Top 15 Luiz Gama Quotes

Historian Lígia Fonseca Ferreira. Source: Os desafios de Luiz Gama na luta dos negros por justiça.

...Luiz Gama was keen to demonstrate, through his example, the fallacy of the pseudoscientific beliefs in vogue in a slaveholding society convinced of the intellectual incapacity and moral inferiority of Africans and their descendants, the basis of the racist ideology that still persists among us.”

Historian Lígia Ferreira. Source: Obra de Luiz Gama revela a luta por um Brasil sem reis ou escravos.

Luiz Gama is the only intellectual, the only black Brazilian personality of the 19th century to have lived the experience of slavery. This is already a fact that makes him unique in the panorama of Brazil in the 19th century".

The slave who kills his master, in any circumstance, always does so in self-defense.

Subtitle of the article "Aos escravocratas" written by Raul Pompeia. Newspaper "ÇA IRA", August 19, 1882. Source: Benedito, Mouzar (2011). Luiz Gama - o libertador de escravos e sua mãe libertária, Luíza Mahin 2 ed. São Paulo: Expressão Popular. Page: 59. ISBN 85-7743-004-9.

Under the law, the crime of murder perpetrated by the slave on the person of the master is justifiable

À Forca o Cristo da Multidão, 1882. Source: Luiz Gama desenha o perfil de Tiradentes.

In front of them Washington, pensive like Archimedes, with the tip of the sacred sword, soaked in the blood of battles, inscribes the United States on the map of the Nations; and Franklin, the modern Teramenes, snatching a ray from the sun, with lucid stars, engraves in infinity the eternal legend of Liberty.

Gazeta da Tarde, [Carta a Ferreira de Menezes], January 07, 1881. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama.

A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state.

A Província de São Paulo, Carta a Ferreira de Menezes, December 18, 1880. Source: Leia artigo de Luiz Gama publicado há mais de 140 anos nas páginas do Estadão.

There are scenes of such greatness, or of such misery, that being complete in their kind, they cannot be described; the world and the atom define themselves; thus, crime and virtue keep the same proportion; thus, the slave who kills the master, who fulfills an inevitable prescription of natural right, and the unworthy people, who murder heroes, will never be mixed.

A Província de São Paulo, “Questão forense”, October 14, 1880. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama.

I am an abolitionist, without reservation; I am a citizen; I believe I have done my duty.