Frederick Douglass: “I bent myself to devising ways and means for our escape, and meanwhile strove, on all fitting occasions, to impress them…”

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.

It had no interest in recognizing or preserving any of the ties that bind families together or to their homes.

His iron sentences, cold and harsh, sunk like heavy weights deep into my heart, and stirred up within me a rebellion not soon to be allayed.