“Self-made men are the men who, under peculiar difficulties and without the ordinary helps of favoring circumstances, have attained knowledge, usefulness, power and position and have learned from themselves the best uses to which life can be put in this world, and in the exercises of these uses to build up worthy character.”

— Frederick Douglass

1870s, Self-Made Men (1872)

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Frederick Douglass 274

American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman 1818–1895

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