We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
Freedom is a road seldom traveled by the multitude.
The opposite of compromise is character.
A government, founded on impartial liberty, where all have a voice and a vote, irrespective of color or of sex – what is there to hinder such a government from standing firm.
Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.
The more I read, the more I was led to abhor and detest my enslavers.
If I have advocated the cause of the Negro, it is not because I am a Negro, but because I am a man.
The silver trump of freedom roused in my soul eternal wakefulness.
Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.
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.