I have sometimes thought that the American people are too great to be small, too just and magnanimous to oppress the weak, too brave to yield up the … - Frederick Douglass

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.

A man to whom despotism is the savior and liberty the destroyer of society, who, during the last twenty years, in every contest between liberty and oppression, uniformally and promptly took sides with the oppressor; who regarded every extension of the right of suffrage, even to white men in his own country, as shooting Niagara; who gloated over deeds of cruelty, and talked of applying to the backs of men the beneficent whip, to the great delight of many of the slaveholders of America in particular, could have but little sympathy with our emancipated and progressive Republic, or with the triumph of liberty any where. But the American people can easily stand the utterances of such a man. They however have a right to be impatient and indignant at those among ourselves who turn the most hopeful portents into omens of disaster, and make themselves the ministers of despair, when they should be those of hope, and help cheer on the country in the new grand career of justice upon which it has now so nobly and bravely entered.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.