Hard work, night and day, over a furnace hot enough to keep the metal running like water, was more favorable to action than thought; yet here I often nailed a newspaper to the post near my bellows, and read while I was performing the up and down motion of the heavy beam by which the bellows was inflated and discharged.
Douglass recounts his relentless pursuit of knowledge and reading even amidst the demanding and physically exhausting work at a brass foundry.
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The nation or people which shall comply with them will rise, and those which violate them will fall, and perhaps will disappear altogether.
The old slave quarter that had before sheltered them, and the fields that had yielded them corn, were now denied them.
Let us then, wherever we are, whether at the North or at the South, resolutely struggle on in the belief that there is a better day coming, and that we by patience, industry, uprightness, and economy may hasten that better day.
In any fair condition of things the men who till the soil will become proprietors of the soil.