Frederick Douglass: “If there were no other fact descriptive of slavery, than that the slave is dumb, this alone would be sufficient to mark…”

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.

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

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

My grandmother was all the world to me, and the thought of being separated from her was a most unwelcome suggestion to my affections and hopes.