Frederick Douglass: “It is not only mock modesty, but mob modesty.”

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.

But we are not here to applaud manly courage, save as it has been displayed in a noble cause.

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.

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.