Frederick Douglass: “Slaveholders ever underrate the intelligence with which they have to grapple.”

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.

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

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