The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress.

Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.

As those who believe in the visibility of ghosts can easily see them, so it is always easy to see repulsive qualities in those we despise and hate.

The life of the nation is secure only while the nation is honest, truthful, and virtuous.

Every tone [of the songs of the slaves] was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.