Frederick Douglass: “The slave is a subject, subjected by others; the slaveholder is a subject, but he is the author of his own subjection.”

I looked into this kitchen with peculiar interest, and remembered that it was there I last saw my mother.

This was a new and special revelation, dispelling a painful mystery against which my youthful understanding had struggled, and struggled in vain, to wit, the white man’s power to perpetuate the enslavement of the black man.

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.