William Lloyd Garrison Quotes

We want, and must have, a national policy, as to slavery, which deals with it as being wrong.

When you think about the abolition of slavery for example, for the ruling class with the rich white people owning plantations and states, and things like that, slavery was to their benefit. To oppose it didn't make any sense at all on a rational basis. But on a rights basis, on a principle basis, it made obvious, overwhelming sense.

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.

We think slavery a great moral wrong, and while we do not claim the right to touch it where it exists, we wish to treat it as a wrong in the territories, where our votes will reach it.

I welcomed the organization of the Anti-slavery Society.

Slavery will everywhere be abolished or everywhere reinstated.

I have watched how steadily the general feeling, as shown at elections, has been rising against Slavery. What a proud thing for England if she is the first European nation which utterly abolishes it! I was told before leaving England that after living in slave countries all my opinions would be altered; the only alteration I am aware of is forming a much higher estimate of the negro character.

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.

Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.

I could not comprehend the justice of that law, or that religion, which upholds or recognizes the principle of slavery.

Roll, years of promise, rapidly roll round, till not a slave shall on this earth be found.

I wish all men to be free. I wish the material prosperity of the already free which I feel sure the extinction of slavery would bring.

The day is not distant when we must bear and adopt [the abolition of slavery], or worse will follow.

Be faithful, be vigilant, be untiring in your efforts to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free. Come what may - cost what it may - inscribe on the banner which you unfurl to the breeze, as your religious and political motto - "NO COMPROMISE WITH SLAVERY! NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS

I believe a time will come when an opportunity will be offered to abolish this lamentable evil. Everything we do is to improve it, if it happens in our day; if not, let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot and an abhorrence of slavery.

Not only do I pray for it, on the score of human dignity, but I can clearly forsee that nothing but the rooting out of slavery can perpetuate the existence of our union, by consolidating it in a common bond of principle.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think, and feel. And yet I have never understood that the Presidency conferred upon me an unrestricted right to act officially upon this judgment and feeling.

It is proclaimed by the great leaders of that party, by its political conventions, by its ministers of the Gospel, and by every other means they have of giving currency and importance to the declaration, that it is its mission to abolish slavery in the Union.

The Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, --the earliest association in this country founded upon the principle that the institution of slavery is, under all circumstances, a sin against God, and there to be immediately and unconditionally abolished

No compromise with slave holders!

There will be no peace in this land until slavery is ended.

In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best, hope on earth.

We must make good in essence as well as in form Madison's avowal that "the word slave ought not to appear in the Constitution"; and we must even go further and decree that only local law, and not that time-honored instrument [the Constitution], shall shelter a slave-holder.

We [Republicans] have to fight this battle [against slavery] upon principle alone, so I hope those with whom I am surrounded have principle enough to nerve themselves for the task, and leave nothing undone that can fairly be done to bring about the right result.