Charles Sumner Quotes

To end slavery, you must overcome the mental and physical inertia of the masses and quicken their intelligence and creative faculty.

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.

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.

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

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!

If we ever get free from all the oppressions and wrongs heaped upon us, we must pay for their removal. We must do this by labor, by suffering, by sacrifice, and, if needs be, by our lives, and the lives of others.

Death is a slave's freedom.

In raising a people from slavery to freedom, you have called them to act on a new theatre; and it is a necessary part of your business, to teach them how to perform their parts.

Slavery will not be overthrown without excitement, a most tremendous excitement.

The struggle of our people for freedom has progressed to the form where all of us must take a stand either for or against the freedom of our people You are either with Your People or against them. You are either part of the solution or part of the problem.

Struggle for freedom. Where people are denied the right of choice, recourse to such struggle is the only means of achieving their liberties.

The work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.

William Lloyd Garrison was up there with Frederick Douglass being thrown off trains and going through what happened in the 1960s in 1840 in Boston.

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

It is hard for the old slave holding spirit to die. But die it must.

I did say, at Chicago, in my speech there, that I do wish to see the spread of slavery arrested and to see it placed where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction.

it is immoral for powerless people to accept this powerlessness. They may not succeed in getting power but they can fight for it, and if enough fight for it, it makes it very difficult for the people with the big sticks.

The hope of remaking the world is indispensable in the struggle of oppressed men and women.

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

If the negro is a man, why then my ancient faith teaches me that ‘all men are created equal,' and that there can be no moral right in connection with one man's making a slave of another.

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

Who but shall learn that freedom is the prize Man still is bound to rescue or maintain; That nature's God commands the slave to rise, And on the oppressor's head to break the chain. Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, Till not a slave shall on this earth by found.

I'm not trying to get power over white. I'm involved in a freedom struggle. Not a power struggle.

The very founders that wrote those documents worked tirelessly until slavery was no more.