Frederick Douglass: “It is indeed all over with us; we are surely betrayed,” I thought to myself.”

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.

For the moment the northern lamb was transformed into a lion, and his roar was terrible.

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

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave.” I instinctively assented to the proposition, and from that moment I understood the direct pathway from slavery to freedom.