Frederick Douglass: “We cannot ignore it if we would, and ought not if we could.”

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

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.

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

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