Frederick Douglass: “Besides, if there is one thing more impossible than another, it is a position of perfect neutrality in politics.”

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.

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

It was perhaps better for the country and for mankind that the good man could not know the end from the beginning.

I believed I should get enough to eat at Covey’s, even if I suffered in other respects, and this to a hungry man is not a prospect to be regarded with indifference.