Frederick Douglass: “I cannot walk upon your legs, or you upon mine.”

Food to the indolent is poison, not sustenance.

Land is not worth much where there are no people to occupy it, and a mule is not worth much where there is no one to drive him.

Father he might be, and not be husband, and could sell his own child without incurring reproach, if in its veins coursed one drop of African blood.

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.