Frederick Douglass: “Should a slave, when assaulted, but raise his hand in self defense, the white assaulting party is fully justified by…”

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.

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

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.