Frederick Douglass: “I cannot breathe for you, or you for me; I must breathe for myself, and you for yourself.”

To make a man a slave was to rob him of moral responsibility.

We (the people of the North) are a charitable people, and in the excess of this feeling we were disposed to put the very best construction upon the strange behavior of our southern brethren.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.

True it is that this faith was many times shaken by passing events, but never destroyed.