George Carlin Quotes

After the Civil war, everybody in retrospect claimed to be an abolitionist. It’s amazing that slavery survived so long when there were so many abolitionists.

Lincoln emancipated nobody. The man freed not a single slave.

If Lee had won, I'd still be a slave.

No, Islam did not free African-Americans from slavery, not in Africa and not in Europe or America. Evangelical Christianity did that.

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

The Emancipation Proclamation was really a tool of war.

Force sometimes does change things. I see not reason to believe that slavery in America would not have continued to the present day if it did not meet a violent end.

By a series of legislative acts, by executive proclamations, by military orders, and by the adoption of the amendment to the Constitution by the people of the United States, the gigantic system of human slavery that darkened the land, controlled the policy and swayed the destinies of the Republic, has forever perished.

By God, that means nigger citizenship …. That will be the last speech Lincoln will ever make.

When Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, he turned the Civil War into a revolution.

On the eve of the Civil War about a quarter of a million black people lived in the North in freedom. Some of them, of course, were descended from people who never were slaves, who slipped through the net of slavery. The vast majority of them gained their freedom as a result of the American Revolution and the emancipations that followed the American Revolution and hence were free for generations.

Reconstruction did not fail. It was overthrown.

In 'The Birth of a Nation,' Griffith made audiences see the Civil War through his eyes - the eyes of the son of a colonel in the Army of the Confederacy.

In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

I think that Abraham Lincoln probably did more to trick negroes than any other man in history.

To judge by what my children are learning in school, you'd think American history was 75 percent slavery and 25 percent everything else (and that 25 percent includes a large dollop of imperialism, racism, sexism and homophobia, leaving little time for Lincoln, Edison, Clay, Holmes, Alcott, Dickinson, Adams, Longfellow or Fulton).

So far from engaging in a war to perpetuate slavery, I am rejoiced that Slavery is abolished. I believe it will be greatly for the interest of the South. So fully am I satisfied of this that I would have cheerfully lost all that I have lost by the war, and have suffered all that I have suffered to have this object attained.

The war for our Union, with all the constitutional issues which it settled, and all the military lessons which it gathered in, has throughout its dilatory length but one meaning in the eyes of history. It freed the country from the social plague which until then had made political development impossible in the United States. More and more, as the years pass, does the meaning stand forth as the sole meaning.

In name we had the Declaration of Independence in 1776; but we gave the lie by our acts to the words of the Declaration of Independence until 1865; and words count for nothing except in so far as they represent acts.

African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.

The Civil War always moves me.

But it required a disastrous, internecine war to bring this question of human freedom to a crisis, and the process of striking the shackles from the slave was accomplished in a single hour.

Lincoln's paper proclamation must now become iron, lead and fire.

The slave-owning South won the subsequent ideological war…the consensus of history was that the Civil War had little to do with slavery.