Frederick Douglass: “We never undertook anything of any importance which was likely to affect each other, without mutual consultation.”

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.

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

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.

If I have had kicks, I have also had kindness.