Frederick Douglass: “The only trouble is the will! the will! the will!”

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.

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