Frederick Douglass

Once thoroughly broken down, who is he that can repair the damage?

Her noble soul was overthrown; but, he that overthrew it did not, himself, escape the consequences.

I was human, and she, dear lady, knew and felt me to be so.

I could talk and sing; I could laugh and weep; I could reason and remember; I could love and hate.

One cannot easily forget to love freedom; and it is as hard to cease to respect that natural love in our fellow creatures.

Nothing but rigid training, long persisted in, can perfect the character of the one or the other.

Nature has done almost nothing to prepare men and women to be either slaves or slaveholders.

It was, at least, necessary for her to have some training, and some hardening, in the exercise of the slaveholder’s prerogative, to make her equal to forgetting my human nature and character, and to treating me as a thing destitute of a…

She either thought it unnecessary, or she lacked the depravity indispensable to shutting me up in mental darkness.

Hamilton is as justly chargeable to the upholders of the slave system, as drunkenness is chargeable on those who, by precept and example, or by indifference, uphold the drinking system.

Of stone must that heart be made, that could look upon Henrietta and Mary, without being sickened to the core with sadness.

Of all the dejected, emaciated, mangled and excoriated creatures I ever saw, those two girls—in the refined, church going and Christian city of Baltimore were the most deplorable.