Frederick Douglass

It was a sad thing to me, that, loving each other as we had done, we must now take different roads.

In childhood, he scarcely considered me inferior to himself certainly, as good as any other boy with whom he played; but the time had come when his friend must become his slave.

Here was a broad road of destruction to slavery, which, before, had been looked upon as a wall of security by slaveholders.

Slaves escaping, until now, had taken to the woods; they had never dreamed of profaning and abusing the waters of the noble Chesapeake, by making them the highway from slavery to freedom.

He was furious at the thought of such a piece of high-handed theft, as we were about to perpetrate the stealing of our own bodies and souls!

The prospect, from that point, did look about as dark as any that ever cast its gloom over the vision of the anxious, out-looking, human spirit.

The promise had but one fault; it seemed too good to be true.

Lead and steel are the only arguments that they understand.

To talk to those imps about justice and mercy, would have been as absurd as to reason with bears and tigers.

I was insulted, but helpless; keenly alive to the demands of justice and liberty, but with no means of asserting them.

A life of living death, beset with the innumerable horrors of the cotton field, and the sugar plantation, seemed to be my doom.

The possibility of ever becoming anything but an abject slave, a mere machine in the hands of an owner, had now fled, and it seemed to me it had fled forever.