The Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

If there is no struggle, there is no progress....This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

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.

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

One and God make a majority.

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, . . . neither persons nor property will be safe.