Frederick Douglass: “Against truth and right, legislative enactments were to his mind mere cobwebs--the pompous emptiness of human pride--the…”

The black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization.

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.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.