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Slavery Quotes
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On the question of the gentlemanliness of the debate, I'm reminded that in the Congress, just before the Civil War, the Senator from New Hampshire, I think, made an anti-slavery speech, and a Senator from Mississippi, not Jefferson Davis, invited him to come down to Mississippi to make that speech, promising to see that he was hanged from the highest tree in the forest. The Senator from New Hampshire invited the Senator from Mississippi to come to New Hampshire where he would be given a respectful hearing in every township in that State.
Harry V. Jaffa
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In the first century and in the twentieth, the individual Christian must determine his own course of action in the light of the spirit and teaching of Jesus. He gave Peter, James and John no definite program or mechanism by which they could overcome slavery, idolatry, licentiousness, and militarism, and he gives the Christian of today no scheme of overcoming militarism and oppression. It is by lives lived in the spirit of human brotherhood and worship toward God that he seeks to overcome slavery and idolatry, and it is by lives of aggressive good-will and love at all times and under all circumstances that he seeks to overcome militarism and oppression.
Kirby Page
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Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.
Robert G. Ingersoll
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If a man surrenders all power of self-determination in regard to the profits, management or ownership of the place where he works, he not only loses that special prerogative which marks him off from a cow in a pasture, but what is worse, he loses all capacity for determining any work. This is the beginning of a slavery which sometimes goes by the name of security.
Fulton J. Sheen
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I hold that that is a false logic which talks about good slaveholders.... It is folly for us to talk about the slaveholders being kind. Cruelty is part and parcel of the system. If slavery is right at all, then all its terrors and horrors,—the whip, the manacle, the thumbscrew, the paddle, the stake, the gibbet—are right also; if it is not right, then all these are wrong.
J. Sella Martin
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Among the various evils to which society has been subjected, none have been more general or more deadly than slavery. No portion of the globe has been exempt from this curse.
Alexander Crummell
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Long time men lay oppress'd with slavish fear Religion's tyranny did domineer... At length a mighty one of Greece began To assert the natural liberty of man, By senseless terrors and vain fancies let To slavery. Straight the conquered phantoms fled.
Lucretius
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My first recollection of hearing Wendell Phillips is from my college days, though of course he was always one of my heroes, and I may have heard him before, for we were an anti-slavery family.
George Edward Woodberry
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Oppression not only makes a wise man mad, it robs him also of his self-respect. And this is our loss; but having emerged from slavery, it is our duty to cast off its grave-clothes and resist its deadly influences.
Alexander Crummell
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Feudalism, serfdom, slavery, all tyrannical institutions, are merely the most vigorous kind to rule, springing out of, and necessarily to, a bad state of man. The progress from these is the same in all cases - less government.
Herbert Spencer
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This world is filled with many vulgar and dishonorable things that will claw and tear at your Christian purity if you allow them to. Don't let them! Seek instead the things of God. He will purify you and free you from your slavery to profane and inconsequential things.
Patrick Madrid
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If he's - the inference is that somehow he thinks slavery is a - is a noble institution I would - I would strongly reject that assumption - that John Ashcroft is a openminded, inclusive person.
George W. Bush
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Slavery appears such a relatively mild business that one begins to wonder why Frederick Douglass and so many others ever tried to escape.
Dinesh D'Souza
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There is great fear expressed on all sides lest this war shall be made a war for the negro. I am willing that it shall be. It is awar to found an empire on the negro in slavery, and shame on us if we do not make it a war to establish the negro in freedom--against whom the whole nation, North and South, East and West, in one mighty conspiracy, has combined from the beginning.
Susan B. Anthony
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It was necessary to put the South at a moral disadvantage by transforming the contest from a war waged against states fighting for their indepdence into a war waged against states fighting for the maintenance and extension of slavery...and the world, it might be hoped, would see it as a moral war, not a political; and the sympathy of nations would begin to run for the North, not for the South.
Woodrow Wilson
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Slavery is useful for early accumulation of capital, but it is too rigid for industrial development. Slaves had to be given crude non-breakable tools which held back the capitalist development of agriculture and industry. That explains the fact that the northern portions of the U.S.A. gained far more industrial benefits from slavery than the South, which actually had slave institutions on its soil; and ultimately the stage was reached during the American Civil War when the Northern capitalists fought to end slavery within the boundaries of the U.S.A. so that the country as a whole could advance to a higher level of capitalism.
Walter Rodney
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Though slavery is thought, by some, to be mild in Missouri, when compared with the cotton, sugar and rice growing states, yet no part of our slave-holding country is more noted for the barbarity of its inhabitants than St. Louis.
William Wells Brown
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The Republican Party is strong enough to dare to do right and cannot afford to shirk a duty. The colored men North and South were loyal to the Government in the days of its greatest peril. There was not a rebel or a traitor to be found among them. They ask the privilege of citizenship now that slavery has been forever banished from our country.
Hiram Price
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The term black or African-American not only denotes race, it denotes condition, and carries with it the vestige of slavery and the social segregation and abuse of opportunity so vivid in our memory.
August Wilson
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Most people agree that slavery is immoral. But what makes it so? Slavery denies a person the right to use his property (body) and the fruits of his labor the way he sees fit. Slavery forcibly uses one person to serve the purposes of another. Tragically, most Americans, including blacks, whose ancestors have suffered from gross property right violations, think it quite proper that one person be forcibly used to serve the purposes of another.
Walter E. Williams
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Your god isn't real. He's not moral. The Bible isn't moral. Islam isn't moral. None of these religious systems— anything that deteriorates the value of human beings, anything that hangs on to Bronze Age ideals about genocide and slavery and murder and deference to higher powers. None of those things are moral. We've graduated beyond that, and I'm sorry that we've had to drag religions kicking and screaming into the 21st century, but some of you gotta let this stuff go. You're not gonna get anywhere until you realize that it's OK not to be afraid. It's OK to say, "you know, I think slavery is wrong. I think slavery was probably always wrong. I think that you're a good person, and yeah it does sound like a crappy system."
Matt Dillahunty
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No community where more than one-half of the adults are disfranchised and otherwise incapacitated by law and custom, can be free from great vices. Purity is inconsistent with slavery.
Tennessee Celeste Claflin
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Nothing is more definitively settled than he [the Black American] must act for himself. He may employ the boycott, emigration, and the press, and I feel that by a combination of all of these agencies can be effectually stamped out lynch law, that last relic of barbarism and slavery. "The gods help those who help themselves."
Ida B. Wells
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There is a battle shaping up in the world – a battle between the forces of archy – of statism, of political rule and authority – and its only alternative – anarchy, the absence of political rule. This battle is the necessary and logical consequence of the battle between individualism and collectivism, between liberty and the state, between freedom and slavery.
Roy Childs
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I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.
Solomon Northup
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