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The hardships and dangers involved in the struggle give strength and toughness to the character, and enable it to stand firm in storm as well as in sunshine.

To balance probabilities, where life and liberty hang on the result, requires steady nerves.

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

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.

The responsibility of success or failure lay heavily upon me.

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

Liberty, as the inestimable birthright of every man, converted every object into an asserter of this right.

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

To enslave men successfully and safely it is necessary to keep their minds occupied with thoughts and aspirations short of the liberty of which they are deprived.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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