Frederick Douglass: “The law gives the master absolute power over the slave.”

I wished it was possible I could remain small all my life, knowing that the sooner I grew large the shorter would be my time to remain with them.

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

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.

We could not but believe that there existed at the South a latent and powerful Union sentiment which would assert itself at last.