Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes!

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

[The Underground Railroad] demonstrated to northerners, white northerners, who were not committed to the end of slavery, how horrendous an institution slavery was. How much black people desired freedom. What they would do, the extent they would do to gain that freedom. This against the slave holders' propaganda that slavery was a benevolent institution and that black people were happy as slaves.

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.

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!

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

The slave power dares anything, and it can be conquered only by the united masses of the people. From Congress to the people, I appeal.

Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States ... I have, throughout my whole life, held the practice of slavery in ... abhorrence.

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

There never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians—Englishmen and Americans—created one.

None of the black abolitionist newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1827, was in existence after the Civil War.

You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it.

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 [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church. . . . With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh.

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.

Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.

Whatever Lincoln's racial views, which are not totally modern and egalitarian in many ways, he believes blacks should have this natural right to improve their condition in life and slavery denies that to them.

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

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.

Free labor has the inspiration of hope; pure slavery has no hope.

Death is a slave's freedom.

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

So long as this country is cursed with slavery, so too will it be cursed with vampires.

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.