Frederick Douglass: “Once thoroughly broken down, who is he that can repair the damage?”

Treason had shot its poisonous roots deeper, and had spread its death-dealing branches further than any northern calculation had covered.

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

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

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.