Thomas Jefferson Quotes

I don't believe in segregation. I believe in slavery.

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

One fact, when I was a slave, often filled me with indignation. There were many poor white lads of about my own age, belonging to families scattered around, who were as poor in personal effects as we were; and yet, though our companions, (when we chose to tolerate them,) they did not have to be controlled by a master, to go and come at his command, to be sold for his debts, or whenever he wanted extra pocket-money. The preachers of a slave-trading gospel frequently told us, in their sermons, that we should be "good boys," and not break into master's hen-roost, nor steal his bacon; but they never told this to these poor white people, although they knew very well that they encouraged the slaves to steal, trafficked in stolen goods, and stole themselves.

The story of our inferiority is an old dodge, as I have said; for wherever men oppress their fellows, wherever they enslave them, they will endeavor to find the needed apology for such enslavement and oppression in the character of the people oppressed and enslaved

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

For people who have been slaves for 150 years doing all the work to be called lazy and shiftless by the man who was sitting on the porch—that is a phenomenon in itself.

We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.

Use all the Negroes you can get for ... cooking, digging, chopping and such. But don't arm them. If slaves will make good soldiers, our whole theory of slavery is wrong.

So long as the slave remains ignorant and docile and contented he is taken care of, humored and spoken of with a contemptuous, compassionate kindness. But from the moment he exhibits the attributes of a rational being, from the moment his intellect seems likely to come into the most distant competition with that of whites, the most deadly hatred springs up—not in the black, but in his oppressors.

If a white teach a free negro or a slave to write he is fined $500, and imprisoned at the discretion of the Court; if the offender be a colored man, bond or free, he may be fined or whipped at the discretion of the Court

Is not the meager, thin, long, chop-fallen, half-starved savage, as you find him a prisoner of war in negro land, a barbarian, compared to the happy, contented, well developed, strong, hearty, well clothed, well fed, negro slave in his Christianized state of American Slavery?

Slavery made the Negro as dependent upon the intelligence and foresight of his master as a soldier upon the will of his commander

There is not an inn between Washington and Montgomery, a distance of over 1000 miles, that will accommodate me to a bed or a meal. Now then, is there a man on this floor who is so heartless, whose breast is so void of better feelings, as to say that this brutal custom needs no regulation. I hold that it does, and Congress is the body to regulate it.

the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration of particularly economic power today puts the majority of mankind into slavery to the rest. But one thing is sure and that is that these ancestors of mine and their descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.

The negro, whom a million Americans died to free, is, in present bond and future promise still a slave, whipped by circumstance, trodden under foot by iron and ineradicable prejudice; shut out forever from the opportunities which are the heritage of liberty, and, holding in his black hand the hollow parchment of his franchise as a freeman, looks through a slave's eyes at the impassable barriers which imprison him forever within the progress and achievement of a dominant and all-conquering race.

The very name of the Bureau stood for a thing in the South which for two centuries and better men had refused even to argue, -- that life amid free Negroes was simply unthinkable, the maddest of experiments. The agents which the Bureau could command varied all the way from unselfish philanthropists to narrow-minded busybodies and thieves; and even though it be true that the average was far better than the worst, it was the one fly that helped to spoil the ointment. Then, amid all this crouched the freed slave, bewildered between friend and foe. He had emerged from slavery.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

… if you are idle, and take to bad courses, you will hurt those of your brethren who are slaves, and do all in your power to prevent their being free.

A slave-owner who through cunning and violence shackles a slave in chains, and a slave who through cunning or violence breaks the chains – let not the contemptible eunuchs tell us that they are equals before a court of morality!

We were stolen from our mother country and brought here. We have tilled the ground and made fortunes for thousands, and still they are not weary of our services. _But they who stay to till the ground must be slaves_. Is there not land enough in America, or 'corn enough in Egypt'? Why should they send us into a far country to die? See the thousands of foreigners emigrating to America every year: and if there be ground sufficient for them to cultivate, and bread for them to eat, why would they wish to send the ‘first tillers’ of the land away? Africans have made fortunes for thousands, who are yet unwilling to part with their services; but the free must be sent away, and those who remain must be slaves. I have no doubt that there are many good men who do not see as I do, and who are sending us to Liberia; but they have not duly considered the subject--they are not men of color. This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our ‘mother country’, and we are well satisfied to stay where wisdom abounds and the gospel is free.

“Slavery always degrades labor. The white people who work with their hands are ranked with the other laborers— the slaves ... They feel that they are degraded and despised.

Why is Slavery so much condemn'd and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded and held so necessary and so sacred in another?

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live.

I feel that I am a citizen of the American dream and that the revolutionary struggle of which I am a part is a struggle against the American nightmare.