I didn’t know I was a slave until I found out I couldn’t do the things I wanted.
Power concedes nothing without demand. It never has and never will. Show me the exact amount of wrong and injustices that are visited upon a person and I will show you the exact amount of words endured by these people.
Our destiny is largely in our hands.
The thought of only being a creature of the present and the past was troubling. I longed for a future too, with hope in it. The desire to be free, awakened my determination to act, to think, and to SPEAK.
It is better to be part of a great whole than to be the whole of a small part.
Every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.
There are at present many Coloured men in the Confederate Army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and labourers, but real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets.
The man who will get up will be helped up; and the man who will not get up will be allowed to stay down.
I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of increasing my contentment; it only increased my desire to be free, and set me thinking of plans to gain my freedom.
Immense wealth, and its lavish expenditure, fill the great house with all that can please the eye, or tempt the taste. Here, appetite, not food, is the great desideratum.
Instead of the bright, blue sky of America, I am covered with the soft, grey fog of the Emerald Isle. I breathe, and lo! the chattel becomes a man.
Men and women, old and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep, and swine.
Experience proves that those are oftenest abused who can be abused with the greatest impunity. Men are whipped oftenest who are whipped easiest.
In all the relations of life and death, we are met by the color line.
From the first I saw no chance of bettering the condition of the freedman until he should cease to be merely a freedman and should become a citizen.
This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.
Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.
I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.
Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.
A man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box.
I am a Republican, a black, dyed in the wool Republican, and I never intend to belong to any other party than the party of freedom and progress.