These were choice documents to me... They gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own soul, which had frequently flashed through my mind, and died away for want of utterance.

You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded. You shut our mouths and ask why we don't speak. You close your colleges and seminaries against us and then ask why we don't know.

Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place.

Without a struggle, there can be no progress.

Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one's thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.

When men sow the wind it is rational to expect that they will reap the whirlwind.

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