179 Quotes Tagged: slavery

For my own part I would as soon be descended from that heroic little monkey, who braved his dreaded enemy in order to save the life of his keeper; or from that old baboon, who, descending from the mountains, carried away in triumph his young comrade from a crowd of astonished dogs — as from a savage who delights to torture his enemies, offers up bloody sacrifices, practices infanticide without remorse, treats his wives like slaves, knows no decency, and is haunted by the grossest superstitions.

I am aware that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or to speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; — but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.

... laws of changeless justice bind
Oppressor with oppressed;
And, close as sin and suffering joined,
We march to Fate abreast.

A man who will enslave his own blood, may not be safely relied on for magnamity.

I know of no evil that ever existed, nor can imagine any evil to exist, worse than the tearing of seventy or eighty thousand persons every year from their own land.

Those who do not think that employment is systemic slavery are either blind or employed.

"He has said that the Americans are our children, and how can they revolt against their parent? He says, that, if they are not free in their present state, England is not free; because Manchester, and other considerable places, are not represented. So, then, because some towns in England are not represented, America is to have no representative at all. They are "our children"; but when children ask for bread, we are not to give a stone. Is it because the natural resistance of things, and the various mutations of time, hinders our government, or any scheme of government, from being any more than a sort of approximation to the right, is it therefore that the colonies are to recede from it infinitely? When this child of ours wishes to assimilate to its parent, and to reflect with a true filial resemblance the beauteous countenance of British liberty, are we to turn to them the shameful parts of our constitution? are we to give them our weakness for their strength, our opprobrium for their glory, and the slough of slavery, which we are not able to work off, to serve them for their freedom?"

That a man might do something very audacious and desperate for money, power or fame, was to the general apprehension quite possible; but, in face of plainly-written law, in face of constitutional guarantees protecting each state against domestic violence, in face of a nation of forty million of people, that nineteen men could invade a great State to liberate a despised and hated race, was to the average intellect and conscience, too monstrous for belief.

I will not attack your doctrines nor your creeds if they accord liberty to me. If they hold thought to be dangerous - if they aver that doubt is a crime, then I attack them one and all, because they enslave the minds of men.

I attack the monsters, the phantoms of imagination that have ruled the world. I attack slavery. I ask for room — room for the human mind.

There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

"The frequent hearing of my mistress reading
the bible — for she often read aloud when her
husband was absent — soon awakened my
curiosity in respect to this mystery of reading,
and roused in me the desire to learn. Having no
fear of my kind mistress before my eyes, (she
had given me no reason to fear,) I frankly asked
her to teach me to read; and without hesitation,
the dear woman began the task, and very soon,
by her assistance, I was master of the alphabet,
and could spell words of three or four
letters...Master Hugh was amazed at the
simplicity of his spouse, and, probably for the
first time, he unfolded to her the true philosophy
of slavery, and the peculiar rules necessary to
be observed by masters and mistresses, in the
management of their human chattels. Mr. Auld
promptly forbade the continuance of her
[reading] instruction; telling her, in the first
place, that the thing itself was unlawful; that it
was also unsafe, and could only lead to mischief.... Mrs. Auld evidently felt the force of
his remarks; and, like an obedient wife, began
to shape her course in the direction indicated by
her husband. The effect of his words, on me,
was neither slight nor transitory. His iron
sentences — cold and harsh — sunk deep into my
heart, and stirred up not only my feelings into a
sort of rebellion, but awakened within me a
slumbering train of vital thought. It was a new
and special revelation, dispelling a painful
mystery, against which my youthful
understanding had struggled, and struggled in
vain, to wit: the white man's power to perpetuate
the enslavement of the black man. "Very well,"
thought I; "knowledge unfits a child to be a
slave." I instinctively assented to the
proposition; and from that moment I understood
the direct pathway from slavery to freedom. This
was just what I needed; and got it at a time, and
from a source, whence I least expected it....
Wise as Mr. Auld was, he evidently underrated
my comprehension, and had little idea of the
use to which I was ca

When I want to find the vanguard of the people I look to the uneasy dreams of an aristocracy and find what they dread most.

If we do not restore the Institution of Property we cannot escape restoring the Institution of Slavery; there is no third course.

The democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man's right of property...
This is a world of compensations; and he would -be- no slave must consent to -have- no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.
All honor to Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. Your obedient Servant,
[Abraham Lincoln]
April 6, 1859, in a letter to MA State Rep Henry L. Pierce
Springfield, Ill.

Human nature is full of riddles and contradictions; its very complexity engenders art — and by art I mean the search for something more than simple linear formulations, flat solutions, oversimplified explanations. One of these riddles is: how is it that people who have been crushed by the sheer weight of slavery and cast to the bottom of the pit can nevertheless find strength to rise up and free themselves, first in spirit and then in body; while those who soar unhampered over the peaks of freedom suddenly appear to lose the taste for freedom, lose the will to defend it, and, hopelessly confused and lost, almost begin to crave slavery. Or again: why is it that societies which have been benumbed for half a century by lies they have been forced to swallow find within themselves a certain lucidity of heart and soul which enables them to see things in their true perspective and to perceive the real meaning of events; whereas societies with access to every kind of information suddenly plunge into lethargy, into a kind of mass blindness, a kind of voluntary self deception.