Orestes Augustus Brownson Quotes

But I think of all the Christian denominations in the United States the Catholics are the last the Southern people should join in attempting to put under the ban of civil proscription. For as a church they have never warred against us or our peculiar institutions. No man can say as much of the New England Baptists, Presbyterians or Methodists: the long role of abolition petitions with which Congress has been so excited and agitated for years past come not from the Catholics; their pulpits in the North are not desecrated every Sabbath with anathemas against slavery.

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?

Literature is made upon any occasion that a challenge is put to the legal apparatus by conscience in touch with humanity.

It is manifestly vital to the success of the anti-slavery cause, that the authority and influence of proslavery, especially of slaveholding, ministers should be destroyed.

There never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians—Englishmen and Americans—created one.

This filthy enactment [the Fugitive Slave Law] was made in the nineteenth century, by people who could read and write. I will not obey it, by God.

God knows that I detest slavery, but it is an existing evil, for which we are not responsible, and we must endure it, and give it such protection as is guaranteed by the constitution, till we can get rid of it without destroying the last hope of free government in the world.

No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another.

Barbary is hell – So, alas, is all America south of Pennsylvania; for oppression, and slavery, and misery, are there!

For half a century past, the African slave-trade began to awaken a spirit of remorse and sympathy in the breasts of men, and a conviction that the traffic was repugnant to the principles of Christian duty, and the maxims of justice and humanity

The maternal love of the Catholic Church embraces all people. As you know, venerable brother, the Church from the beginning sought to completely eliminate slavery, whose wretched yoke has oppressed many people.

There has never been a day in which Catholics, in the communion of the Church and uncensored by her, have not held slaves.

You are all in mortal sin, and live and die in it, because of the cruelty and tyranny you practice among these innocent peoples., Tell me, by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these peoples, who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own land? Wars in which you have destroyed such infinite numbers of them by homicides and slaughters never before heard of? Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather, you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day? … Are these not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not bound to love them as you love yourselves? Don’t you understand this? Don’t you feel this? Why are you sleeping in such a profound lethargic slumber?

Our natural, God-given right of free-speech, though constitutionally recognized as sacred in every part of the country, can be exercised in the slaveholding States only at the peril of our lives. Slavery cannot bear one ray of light, or the slightest criticism.

The ultimate aim of government is not to rule, or restrain, by fear, nor to exact obedience, but contrariwise, to free every man from fear, that he may live in all possible security; in other words, to strengthen his natural right to exist and work without injury to himself or others.

Consciences keep silence more often than they should, that's why laws were created.

The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects.

He [Stephen Douglas] is blowing out the moral lights around us, when he contends that whoever wants slaves has a right to hold them

A time comes when silence is betrayal.

When the hour comes for dealing with slavery, I trust I will be willing to do my duty though it cost my life.

I never really saw myself as an activist but at some point the activist is the only moral position to take.

Whatever Lincoln's racial views, which are not totally modern and egalitarian in many ways, he believes blacks should have this natural right to improve their condition in life and slavery denies that to them.

We want, and must have, a national policy, as to slavery, which deals with it as being wrong.

Now what is Judge Douglas Popular Sovereignty? It is, as a principle, no other than that, if one man chooses to make a slave of another man, neither that other man nor anybody else has a right to object.

We think slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the territories, where our votes will reach it.