Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.
It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken men.
I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.
Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.
Without a struggle, there can be no progress.
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.
To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.
I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.
The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.
No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
I had as well be killed running as die standing.
If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.
The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart.
A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar, – and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women, – before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.