The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. . . .If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.
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What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July I answer A day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustices and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham.
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The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppose.
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It is not really difficult to construct a series of inferences, each dependent upon its predecessor and each simple in itself. If, after doing so, one simply knocks out all the central inferences and presents one's audience with the starting-point and the conclusion, one may produce a startling, though perhaps a meretricious, effect.
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Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without planting up the ground. They want rain without thunder or lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may not be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.
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A gentleman will not insult me, and no man not a gentleman can insult me.
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No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.
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I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence.
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The soul that is within me no man can degrade.
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People might not get all they work for in this world, but they must certainly work for all they get.
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If there is no struggle, there is no progress.
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Without a struggle, there can be no progress.
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