Abolitionist Quotes

There are those who view the abolitionists as just maniacs, apolitical fanatics who helped to cause the war, and Lincoln is the model of responsible statesmanship. I think that is a misconception, the idea that Lincoln knows what's possible and the abolitionists don't.

If I had to write down the most important people in the history of this planet, No.1 would be (abolitionist) John Brown. Why? Because he's a white man who said he would die for the cause, because they could take him, but they weren't going to take his grandchildren. That brother was beautiful.

As Frederick Douglas, the famous abolitionist, said: "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will." You need the truth, and you also need a demand, and you need to bring that demand into the realm of electoral politics. If you don't do that, it's very hard to get such an entrenched machine to move.

Louis Brandeis beloved uncle, Lewis Dembitz, was an ardent abolitionist. His mother was an abolitionist in Kentucky at a time when Brandeis remembered hearing the shot from the confederate soldiers after the second battle of Bull Run. Amazing to think that he heard that and I studied with one of his last law clerks in college. And that encapsulates almost all of American history.

It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation. Yes we can. It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail towards freedom through the darkest of nights. Yes we can. It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness. Yes we can.

I came from an intellectual family. Most were doctors, preachers, teachers, businessmen. My grandfather was a small businessman. His father was an abolitionist doctor, and his father was an immigrant from Germany.

Movements are not radical. Movements are the American way. A small group of abolitionists writing and speaking eventually led to the end of slavery. A few stirred-up women brought about women's voting. The Populist movement, the Progressive movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement, the women's movement - the examples go on and on of 'little people' getting together and telling the truth about their lives. They made our government act.

We've actually bought quite a number of historical pieces. We are doing a piece on the abolitionists, Harper's Ferry and the abolitionist John Brown with Paul Giamatti.

I was a woman before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for the women.

Veganism is not a "sacrifice." It is a joy.

It is the mind that makes the body.

I will be as harsh as truth and as uncompromising as justice.

I grew up like a neglected weed - ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.

True friendship can afford true knowledge. It does not depend on darkness and ignorance.

An early-morning walk is a blessing for the whole day.

Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence.

Nature is full of genius, full of the divinity; so that not a snowflake escapes its fashioning hand.

Only that day dawns to which we are awake.

We sleep, but the loom of life never stops, and the pattern which was weaving when the sun went down is weaving when it comes up in the morning.

Young love is a flame; very pretty, often very hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. The love of the older and disciplined heart is as coals, deep-burning, unquenchable.

Love must be as much a light as it is a flame.

It is one of the severest tests of friendship to tell your friend his faults. So to love a man that you cannot bear to see a stain upon him, and to speak painful truth through loving words, that is friendship.

Belief in oneself is one of the most important bricks in building any successful venture.

Love without faith is as bad as faith without love.

Nowhere is wisdom more necessary than in the guidance of charitable impulses. Meaning well is only half our duty; Thinking right is the other, and equally important, half.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

But gentlemen, as long as I am an American Citizen, and as long as American blood runs in these veins, I shall hold myself at liberty to speak, to write, and to publish whatever I please on any subject.

As a single footstep will not make a path on the earth, so a single thought will not make a pathway in the mind. To make a deep physical path, we walk again and again. To make a deep mental path, we must think over and over the kind of thoughts we wish to dominate our lives.

Radical feminist theorists do not seek to make gender a bit more flexible, but to eliminate it. They are gender abolitionists, and understand gender to provide the framework and rationale for male dominance. In the radical feminist approach, masculinity is the behaviour of the male ruling class and femininity is the behaviour of the subordinate class of women. Thus gender can have no place in the egalitarian future that feminism aims to create.

It's not what you look at that matters, it's what you see.

Greatness lies, not in being strong, but in the right using of strength; and strength is not used rightly when it serves only to carry a man above his fellows for his own solitary glory. He is the greatest whose strength carries up the most hearts by the attraction of his own.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

You [men] are our protectors, is not true; for if you were, who would there be to protect us from?

I feel safe even in the midst of my enemies; for the truth is powerful and will prevail.

Friends... they cherish one another's hopes. They are kind to one another's dreams.

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.

Never wound a snake; kill it.

When you get into a tight place, and everything goes against you till it seems as if you could n't hold on a minute longer, never give up then, for that 's just the place and time that the tide'll turn.

Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.

Somehow it has been forgotten that the Republican party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement, with one simple creed: that slavery is a violation of the rights of man.

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground.

Here, before God, in the presence of these witnesses, from this time, I consecrate my life to the destruction of slavery!

Slave power crushes freedom of speech and of opinion. Slave power degrades labor. Slave power is arrogant, is jealous and intrusive, is cruel, is despotic, not only over the slave but over the community, the state.

There is a large body of abolitionists in Clinton and Clark Counties in this state, and in Wayne County Indiana, that would undoubtedly support such a store, but whether their support would be sufficient, I am unable to say.

One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

That a majority of the Abolitionists in this place would patronize a free labor store, in preference to others, I do not doubt; but we do not muster money in Cincinnati.

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.

In such a condition of affairs, the practical difference between the abolitionist and the sympathizer, to the man who lost his slave and could not recover it, was very nebulous.

The most important form of incremental change is the decision by the individual to become vegan. Veganism, or the eschewing of all animal products, is more than a matter of diet or lifestyle; it is a political and moral statement in which the individual accepts the principle of abolition in her own life. Veganism is the one truly abolitionist goal that we can all achieve - and we can achieve it immediately, starting with our next meal.

It’s time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S and around the world.