Frederick Douglass: “Come, saints and sinners, hear me tell How pious priests whip Jack and Nell, And women buy and children sell, And preach…”

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.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

The black man (unlike the Indian) loves civilization.

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.