“A man must be disposed to judge of emancipation by other tests than whether it has increased the produce of sugar,—and to hate slavery for other reasons than because it starves men and whips women,—before he is ready to lay the first stone of his anti-slavery life.”

“…I would rather lay down my life for others’ freedom than die quietly in slavery.”

“Patterning your life around other's opinions is nothing more than slavery. ”

“Any property taken away from others, whether by stealth, fraud or violence, must be wrong: but to take away men themselves, and keep them in slavery, must be worse.”

“I have observed this in my experience of slavery,--that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom. I have found that, to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason. He must be able to detect no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that slavery is right; and he can be brought to that only when he ceased to be a man.”

“I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.”