Susan B. Anthony Quotes

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

Slavery doesn't have any positives.

Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.

But, slavery is good for some people! ! ! As a good thing, slavery is strikingly peculiar, in this, that it is the only good thing which no man ever seeks the good of, for himself.

In every man's mind the good seeds of liberty are planted, and he who brings his fellow down so low, as to make him contented with a condition of slavery, commits the highest crime against God and man. Brethren, your oppressors aim to do this. They endeavor to make you as much like brutes as possible. When they have blinded the eyes of your mind-when they have embittered the sweet waters of the light which shines from the word of God-then, and not till then has American slavery done its perfect work.

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

Slavery is now nowhere more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.

Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still, Slavery," said I, "still thou art a bitter draught.

A slave-holder cannot hold a slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage for holding the slave.

Slavery always has, and always will produce insurrections wherever it exists, because it is a violation of the natural order of things.

Man puts manacles on his fellow-man; God never.

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

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?

A slave's soul has no worth, my brothers; it lacks strength to tread on this great earth with gallantry and freedom. I pity the poor slaves, they're nought but airy mist, a light breeze scatters them, a fragrance knocks them down; it's only just they crawl on the earth on hands and knees. Today I'll write a hymn to God and pray for this great grace.

I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.

The slave is doomed to worship time and fate and death, because they are greater than anything he finds in himself, and because all his thoughts are of things which they devour.

The world today is divided into the free and the enslaved.