Bryant H. McGill Quotes

In that first blow to the deaf walls of those who have everything, the blood of our people, our blood, ran generously to wash away injustice. To live, we die. Our dead once again walked the way of truth. Our hope was fertilized with mud and blood.

God saw fit, for wise reasons to allow the people of Israel thus to make and possess slaves; but is this any license to us to enslave any of our fellow-men, to kill any of our fellow-men whom we please and are able to destroy, and take possession of their estates?

To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.

We hold our heads high, despite the price we have paid, because freedom is priceless.

Blood alone moves the wheels of history.

Freedom has cost too much blood and agony to be relinquished at the cheap price of rhetoric.

Against eternal injustice, man must assert justice, and to protest against the universe of grief, he must create happiness.

The issue of human rights is one of the most fundamental human issues and also one of the most sensitive and controversial.

As freedom-loving people across the globe hope for an end to tyranny, we will never forget the enormous suffering of the Holocaust.

I say to you that the price of liberty is and always has been blood, human blood, and if our liberties are lost, we shall never regain them except at the price of blood. They must not be lost.

We must remember that the people for whom this change represents a first taste of freedom and a new and brighter future did not allow their resolution to falter, no matter how great the suffering by which they bought this independence.

I would fight for my liberty so long as my strength lasted, and if the time came for me to go, the Lord would let them take me.

A desire to resist oppression is implanted in the nature of man.

Even if my mother had no qualms of conscience concerning ownership of negroes, her sense of duty carried her far beyond the mere supplying of their physical needs, or requiring that they render faithful service.

Because I was born a slave, I love liberty more than you.

If it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children, and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done. [He was executed.]

Liberty and democracy become unholy when their hands are dyed red with innocent blood.

Oh, honest Americans, as Christians hear me for my down-trodden people! Their form of government is as dear to them as yours is precious to you.

If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

God forbid that these beautiful countries become, as did St. Domingue, a theatre of blood and of crime under the pretext of establishing liberty, let them rather remain if necessary one century more under the barbarous and imbecile oppression of Spain.

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man,--who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment, and death itself, in vindication of his own liberty, and, in the next moment, be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose!

Of this I am sure. Slavery is not founded on that generous and Christian principle of doing to others as we should have them do unto us.

What I have learned is that freedom is not free.

I refuse to accept that the shackles of slavery can ever be stronger than the quest for freedom.

You build dreams, you build castles in the air, and you hope that at least part of that will be realized, even under apartheid.