America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class.
You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don’t speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don’t know.
I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death.
The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.
Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart; and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears.
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.
The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.
My hopes were never brighter than now.
Man’s greatness consists in his ability to do and the proper application of his powers to things needed to be done.
I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man’s political hopes and the ark of his safety.
A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.
One and God make a majority.
This war, disguise it as they may, is virtually nothing more or less than perpetual slavery against universal freedoms.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
What to the Slave is the 4th of July.
I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.
A battle lost or won is easily described, understood, and appreciated, but the moral growth of a great nation requires reflection, as well as observation, to appreciate it.
For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.
What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.