Thomas Clarkson Quotes

Emancipation - what is meant by it? Simply that the slaves shall cease to be held as property and shall henceforth be held and treated as human beings. Simply, that we should take our feet from off their necks.

Some people are by nature slaves and will always be so.

I'm tired of being considered property.

The fears of one class of men are not the measure of the rights of another.

Slaves no doubt, but still men.

By a divine paradox, wherever there is one slave there are two

Taught to regard a part of our own Species in the most abject and contemptible Degree below us, we lose that Idea of the dignity of Man which the Hand of Nature had implanted in us, for great and useful purposes.

It is not possible that one man can convert another into a piece of property, thus at once annihilating all his personal rights, without the most flagrant injustice and usurpation.

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

Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.

He who can be, and therefore is, another's, and he who participates in reason enough to apprehend, but not to have, is a slave by nature.

Nursed and educated in the daily habit of seeing the degraded condition, both bodily and mental, of these unfortunate beings [slaves], few minds have yet doubted that they were as legitimate subjects of property as their horses or cattle

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

Whether the institution to be defended is slavery, political absolutism, or the absolutism of the head of a family, we are always expected to judge of it from its best instances; and we are presented with pictures of loving exercise of authority on one side, loving submission to it on the other

In the presence of so much suffering, the condition of slavery, in which a considerable part of the great human family has been sunk in squalor and affliction now for many centuries, is deeply to be deplored; for the system is one which is wholly opposed to that which was originally ordained by God and by nature. The Supreme Author of all things so decreed that man should exercise a sort of royal dominion over beasts and cattle and fish and fowl, but never that men should exercise a like dominion over their fellow men.

Tell me not of rights; talk not of the property of the planter in his slaves! I deny the right--I acknowledge not the property! The principles, the feelings of our nature, rise in rebellion against it

Every organism, every human being, must conquer or serve.

Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other's hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys.

In the beginning, all men were alike and they lived in peace and they shared among them what they had. But now there are two kinds of men, the master and the slave. But there are more of us than there are of you, many more. And we are stronger than you, better than you. All that is good in mankind belongs to us.

The writers of the Declaration of Independence were mistaken when they affirmed that all men are created equal. My slaves did not choose their lot in life, neither did we ask for ours; we are created for these places.

There is not a man beneath the canopy of Heaven who does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

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.

All mankind is divided, as it was at all times and is still, into slaves and freemen.