18th-century Activist Quotes

Thomas Paine

Josiah Henson

Commerce is no other than the traffic of two individuals, multiplied on a scale of number; and, by the same rule that Nature intended the intercourse of two, she intended that of all!

It is a specious but very false reason to allege that, since man has acquired this taste, he ought to be permitted to indulge it — in the first place because Nature has not given him cooked flesh, and because several ages must have rolled away before fire was used. … Nature, then, could have given man only raw or living flesh, and we know that it is repugnant to him over the whole extent of the earth.

Jean-Antoine Gleizes

First, how do you prove that mankind is invested with the right of killing them, and that brutes have been created for the purpose you assert them to be? Secondly, it is to be observed that the flesh of man himself possesses the same nourishing and palatable qualities? And are we then to become cannibals for that reason?

An African, or in other terms,. a Negro may justly challenge and has an undeniable right to his liberty: Consequently, the practice of slave-keeping, which so much abounds in this Land is illicit.. Liberty is equally as precious to a Black man as it is to a white one, and bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other.

On Uncle Tom's Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe:

The truth has never been half-told; the story would be too horrible to hear. I could fill this book with cases that have come under my own experience and observation, by which I could prove that the slaveholder could and did break every one of the ten commandments with impunity.