A slave is someone who sits down, and waits for someone to free them.

The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.

[...] allowing only ordinary ability and opportunity, we may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!! Not transient and fitful effort, but patient, enduring, honest, unremitting and indefatigable work into which the whole heart is put[...] There is no royal road to perfection.

Poverty, ignorance and degradation are the combined evils, these constitute the social disease of the free colored people of the US.

This Fourth of July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn.

...there are at the present moment many colored men in the Confederate Army...as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down loyal troops, and do all that soldiers may do to destroy the Federal government...There were such soldiers at Manassas and they are probably there still.

Opportunity is important but exertion is indispensable.