Frederick Douglass: “I am here, also, because the slaveholders do not want me to be here; they would rather that I were not here.”

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

He was called upon not merely to administer the government, but to decide, in the face of terrible odds, the fate of the Republic.

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

The good to be sought and the evil to be shunned were flung in the balance and weighed against each other.