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Let it be impressed upon all hearts that, beautiful as our fabric is, no earthly power or wisdom could ever reunite its broken fragments.

Hence a sound and comprehensive policy should embrace not less the distant future than the urgent present.

Good citizens may well claim the protection of good laws and the benign influence of good government, but a claim for office is what the people of a republic should never recognize.

Preeminently, the power of our advocacy reposes in our example; but no example, be it remembered, can be powerful for lasting good, whatever apparent advantages may be gained, which is not based upon eternal principles of right and justice.

It rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of my own manhood. It recalled the departed self-confidence, and inspired me again with a determination to be free.

The fatal poison of irresponsible power was already in her hands, and soon commenced its infernal work.

From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

The strength of our determination was about to be fully tested.

The moral which I gained from the dialogue was the power of truth over the conscience of even a slaveholder.

At times I would rise up, a flash of energetic freedom would dart through my soul, accompanied with a faint beam of hope, that flickered for a moment, and then vanished.

The silver trump of freedom had roused my soul to eternal wakefulness.

The responsibility of success or failure lay heavily upon me.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man

Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying brother.

To make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one

My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.

Though conscious of the difficulty of learning without a teacher, I set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost of trouble, to learn how to read.

At times we were almost disposed to give up, and try to content ourselves with our wretched lot; at others, we were firm and unbending in our determination to go.

A man's troubles are always half disposed of, when he finds endurance his only remedy.

Once awakened by the silver trump of knowledge, my spirit was roused to eternal wakefulness.

Brothers and sisters we were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers.

Slavery does away with fathers, as it does away with families.

The absolute power of this distant old master had touched my young spirit with but the point of its cold, cruel iron, and left me something to brood over after the play and in moments of repose.

I had the grief of neglected chances of escape to brood over

The plea for this outrage was then, as it is always, the tyrant's plea of necessity.