People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and the future.
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.
The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.
I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.
A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
At a time like this, scorching irony, not convincing argument, is needed.
I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.
When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.
A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.
Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.
What to the Slave is the 4th of July.
Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.
There is not a man beneath the canopy of Heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.
I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave.
That which is inhuman cannot be divine.
Slaves are generally expected to sing as well as to work.
Experience demonstrates that there may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go down with the other.
Fugitive slaves were rare then, and as a fugitive slave lecturer, I had the advantage of being the first one out.
