Came across this great quotation from Frederick Douglass. He seems to be anticipating the idea of affirmative action and soundly rejecting such a thing. While he is talking specifically about the plight of blacks and the impending end of slavery, his words can apply to us all and are especially apt today when we have a president and Congress trying to help us all with cradle-to-grave government services:

“[I]n regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. … I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! …  And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … [Y]our interference is doing him positive injury.”

- “What the Black Man Wants”: An Address Delivered in Boston, on 26 January 1865, reprinted in 4 The Frederick Douglass Papers 59, 68 (J. Blassingame & J. McKivigan eds. 1991) (emphasis in original).