[Y]our national greatness, swelling vanity; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, are, to Him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy -- a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. |
A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me |
A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people. |
A man's character always takes its hue, more or less, from the form and color of things about him |
Be not discouraged. There is a future for you. . . . The resistance encountered now predicates hope. . . . Only as we rise . . . do we encounter opposition. |
Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them. |
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. |
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 |
I could, as a free man, look across the bay toward the Eastern Shore where I was born a slave. |
I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted |
I expose slavery in this country, because to expose it is to kill it. Slavery is one of those monsters of darkness to whom the light of truth is death |
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. |
I prayed for twenty years but received no answer until I prayed with my legs. |
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. |
I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety |