Frederick Douglass: “It is not what they have done or left undone in the past that turns the scale, but what they are doing, and mean to do…”

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

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.

The laws which determine the destinies of individuals and nations are impartial and eternal.

It was in the air, and men breathed it and were permeated by it, often when they were quite unconscious of its presence.