“All men are free and equal in the grave, if it comes to that.”

O, what an untold world there is in one human heart!

Witness, eternal God! Oh, witness that, from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land!

There are griefs which grow with years.

I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people’s glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

It lies around us like a cloud- A world we do not see; Yet the sweet closing of an eye May bring us there to be.

The Negro is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has deep in his heart a passion for all that is splendid, rich and fanciful.

Scenes of blood and cruelty are shocking to our ear and heart. What man has nerve to do, man has not nerve to hear.

Self respect is impossible without liberty.

Many a humble soul will be amazed to find that the seed it sowed in weakness, in the dust of daily life, has blossomed into immortal flowers under the eye of the Lord.

Home is a place not only of strong affections, but of entire unreserve; it is life’s undress rehearsal, its backroom, its dressing room.

The person who decides what shall be the food and drink of a family, and the modes of its preparation, is the one who decides, to a greater or less extent, what shall be the health of that family.

If you destroy delicacy and a sense of shame in a young girl, you deprave her very fast.

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak. I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.

Half the misery in the world comes of want of courage to speak and to hear the truth plainly and in a spirit of love.

All men & women are created equal.

Equality, absolutely, that’s what defines us. It’s what makes us great. If it doesn’t sit well with your religion, let your God sort it out in the end, but that’s us. We’re equal.

To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.

The Democrats promised equalizing outcomes through unlimited federal assistance while Republicans offered something that seemed less tangible – the promise of equalizing opportunity through free markets.

However energetically society in general may strive to make all the citizens equal and alike, the personal pride of each individual will always make him try to escape from the common level, and he will form some inequality somewhere to his own profit.

The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.

I have done a great deal of work, as much as a man, but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler; but men doing no more, got twice as much pay. We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.

I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.