Frederick Douglass

I felt like a besieged city at news that its defenders had fallen at its gates.

Now that that evil day is past a sight of those sermons would, I doubt not, bring the red blush of shame to the cheeks of many.

In all this and more it illustrates the experience of reform in all ages, and conforms to the laws of human progress--Measures change, principles never.

But any measure is vindicated by its necessity and its results.

It was unpopular for its very fidelity to the cause of liberty and justice.

Anti-slavery thus far had only been sheet lightning; the Buffalo convention sought to make it a thunderbolt.

It was a vast and variegated assemblage, composed of persons from all sections of the North, and may be said to have formed a new departure in the history of forces organized to resist the growing and aggressive demands of slavery and the…

Had some men made such display of rigid virtue, I should have rejected it, as affected, false and hypocritical, but in John Brown, I felt it to be real as iron or granite.

Slavery was a state of war, and the slave had a right to anything necessary to his freedom.

The true object to be sought is first of all to destroy the money value of slave property; and that can only be done by rendering such property insecure.

No man with the feeling of a parent could be less than moved by such a revelation, and I confess that I was shocked, grieved, and indignant.

The vulgar prejudice against color, so common to Americans, met me in several disagreeable forms.