William Lloyd Garrison Quotes

So long as this country is cursed with slavery, so too will it be cursed with vampires.

The slaveholders are publishing, as in so many legibly written volumes, in the faces of their mulatto offspring, the sad, sickening evidences of their abominable immoralities…What a religion must that be, which declares that the system, of which these deeds are part, is ordained, sanctioned, owned and blest, of God!

Death is a slave's freedom.

I hate it because of the monstrous injustice of slavery itself. I hate it because it deprives our republican example of its just influence in the world.

We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.

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.

I should sooner remain in Southern bondage than avail myself of the opportunity of Northern freedom.

Not the Christian religion only, but nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery.

Witness, eternal God! Oh, witness that, from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land!

There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil.

It seems almost incredible that the advocates of liberty should conceive of the idea of selling a fellow creature to slavery.

Negro Slavery is an evil of Colossal magnitude. I am therefore utterly averse to the admission of Slavery into the Missouri Territory, and heartily wish that every Constitutional measure may be adopted for the preservation of it.

I hold it to be a paramount duty of us in the free states, due to the Union of the states, and perhaps to liberty itself (paradox though it may seem) to let the slavery of the other states alone; while, on the other hand, I hold it to be equally clear, that we should never knowingly lend ourselves directly or indirectly, to prevent that slavery from dying a natural death--to find new places for it to live in, when it can no longer exist in the old.

I don't think the people of the slave states will ever consider the subject of slavery in its true light till some other argument is resorted to other than moral persuasion.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

Without slavery the rebellion could never have existed; without slavery it could not continue.

The slave power dares anything, and it can be conquered only by the united masses of the people. From Congress to the people, I appeal.

If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

Let there be no compromise on the question of extending slavery. If there be, all our labor is lost, and, ere long, must be done again.

The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals.

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament.

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.

Antislavery England continues to coquet with the Southern Slaveocracy.

The existence of laws in the States where the newly emancipated negroes reside, which discriminated with gross injustice and hardship against them as a class, was the evil to be remedied …. The one pervading purpose, was protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.