Frederick Douglass: “It will be seen in these pages that I have lived several lives in one.”

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.

Human liberty excludes all idea of home and abroad.

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