Best slavery & emancipation Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings

“Slavery is the great and foul stain upon the North American Union. A dissolution, at least temporary, of the Union, as now constituted, would now be certainly necessary. The Union might then be reorganized on the fundamental principle of emancipation.”

Might Principles Fundamentals Slavery Unions Temporary Foul Stains Emancipation Dissolution Fundamental Principles

Author:John Quincy Adams

“You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war?”

“To the Memory of those faithful brown slave-men of the plantations throughout the South, Daddy's contemporaries all, who during the war while their masters were away fighting in a cause opposed to their emancipation, brought their blankets and slept outside their mistresses' doors, thus keeping night-watch over otherwise unprotected women and children -- a faithful guardianship of which the annals of those troublous times record no instance of betrayal.”

Men Children War Night Fighting Causes Memories Watches Records Doors Masters Slavery Slave South Betrayal Instance Faithful Brown Daddy Mistress Blanket Emancipation Plantations Guardianship

Author:Ruth Stout

“Emancipation should make it possible for woman to be human in the truest sense. Everything within her that craves assertion and activity should reach its fullest expression; all artificial barriers should be broken, and the road towards greater freedom cleared of every trace of centuries of submission and slavery.”

Should Humans Greater Century Expression Broken Activity Slavery Barriers Artificial Womens Rights Submission Crave Assertion Truest Emancipation

Book:Emma Goldman

Source: Emma Goldman

“In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression and no country and no people have struggled so strenuously for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians.”

People Humans Country Terrible Slavery Oppression Conquest Human History Emancipation

Author:Karl Marx

“No slavery can be abolished without a double emancipation, and the master will benefit by freedom more than the freed-man.”

Men Masters Benefits Slavery Emancipation Double Standard

Book:Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews

Source: Lay Sermons, Addresses, and Reviews

“If emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal conncurrence, how are they to fulfill that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people's blood and treasure? It was not the wisdom of the ruling classes, but the heroic resistance to their criminal folly by the working classes of England, that saved the west of Europe from plunging headlong into an infamous crusade for the propagation of slavery on the other side of the Atlantic.”

Source: Karl Marx: Selected Writings

“I can't say with certainty that slavery would have ended more quickly and more completely if the South had been allowed to leave and escaped former slaves had been allowed to remain free, and the North and the rest of the world had been a positive influence on the South. However, it's certainly a possibility that it would have ended sooner if the southern slave owners had agreed to a system of compensated emancipation and freed the slaves without a war and without secession, as most nations that ended slavery did. That absolutely would have been preferable to the Civil War as it happened.”

Ifs World Has Beens I Can War Nations Happened Influence Possibility Slavery Slave South Certainty Former Civil War Owners Southern Emancipation Secession Positive Influence Slave Owners

Author:David Swanson

“If you are going to abolish slavery, that opens up all these other questions: what system of labor is going to replace slave labor? What system of race relations is going to replace the race relations of slavery? Who is going to have power in the post-war South? The Emancipation Proclamation doesn't answer that question, but it throws [it] open.”

Ifs War Answers Race Labor Relation Slavery Slave South Posts Race Relations Emancipation Abolish Proclamation Post War Emancipation Proclamation Slave Labor

Author:Eric Foner

“Abraham Lincoln would have been happy to have solved the slavery problem by compensation - in fact, drew up a gradual, compensated emancipation plan as early as November, 1861 - but no slaveholders were willing to go along with it.”

Problem Slavery Compensation November Emancipation

Author:Allen C. Guelzo

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”

“Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!”

“Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freemen with votes in their hands are left without education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity of the elective franchise, - all alike demand that the still remaining bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free.”

Source: Addresses and Speeches on Various Occasions: 1878-1886

“I wouldn't say that religion has promoted the social progress of mankind. I say that it has been a detriment to the progress of civilization, and I would also say this: that the emancipation of the mind from religious superstition is as essential to the progress of civilization as is emancipation from physical slavery.”

Mind Has Beens Social Religious Progress Atheism Mankind Civilization Essentials Slavery Superstitions Emancipation Social Progress

Author:Culbert Olson

“The fact that an African American sits in the White House at the helm of government in the United States of America on this 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation represents both phenomenal political symbolism and a victory of faith in democracy that should not be lost on any American.”

Source: Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“The Emancipation Proclamation...can remind us in 2013 of all the mistakes we never want to commit again but it can also motivate us to fulfill to an ever greater degree the definitive freedom-sustaining and life-enhancing principles of democracy in living action.”

Want Life Action Freedom Mistake Principles Democracy Greater Degrees Slavery Commit Emancipation Sustaining Proclamation Emancipation Proclamation

Author:Aberjhani

“I repeat the declaration made a year ago, that 'while I remain in my present position I shall not attempt to retract or modify the emancipation proclamation, nor shall I return to slavery any person who is free by the terms of that proclamation, or by any of the Acts of Congress.' If the people should, by whatever mode or means, make it an Executive duty to re-enslave such persons, another, and not I, must be their instrument to perform it.”

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Speeches & Writings Part 2: 1859-1865: Library of America #46

“The scheme, my dear Marqs. which you propose as a precedent, to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this Country from that state of Bondage in wch. they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work.”

People Heart Country States Black Evidence Slavery Dear Black People Schemes Bondage Propose Benevolence Emancipation Precedent

Book:Affectionately Yours, George Washington: A Self-portrait in Letters of Friendship

Source: Affectionately Yours, George Washington: A Self-portrait in Letters of Friendship

“Grant began by expressing a hope that the war would soon be over, and Lee replied by stating that he had for some time been anxious to stop the further effusion of blood, and he trusted that everything would now be done to restore harmony and conciliate the people of the South. He said the emancipation of the Negroes would be no hindrance to the restoring of relations between the two sections of the country, as it would probably not be the desire of the majority of the Southern people to restore slavery then, even if the question were left open to them.”

People Ifs Said Two War Country Done Would Be Desire Left Blood Relation Harmony Slavery Majority South Civil War Grants Southern Anxious Trusted Sections Emancipation Restoring Hindrance

Author:Horace Porter

“Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freeman with votes in their hands are left without education.”

Hands Left Education Half Millions Vote Slavery Emancipation Freeman

Author:Robert Charles Winthrop

“I think slavery was an awful, awful period in our history, but when I look at what's become of black culture since emancipation, I think you have to admit, maybe the Confederacy was on to something”

Thinking Looks Culture Black Periods Slavery Awful Emancipation Black Culture

Author:Zach Braff

“Every emancipation has in it the seeds of a new slavery, and every truth easily becomes a lie.”

Lying Freedom Slavery Seeds Emancipation

Book:The Best of I.F. Stone

Source: The Best of I.F. Stone

“They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work. But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? 'Without the whip the Negro will not work,' said the anti- abolitionist. 'Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated,' said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestor so, the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves them- selves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive.”

Work Slavery Communism Emancipation Wage Labor Serfdom

Book:The Conquest of Bread

Source: The Conquest of Bread

“It was no longer a question of the Union as it was, that was to be reestablished; it was the Union as it should be, that is to say, washed clean from its original sin, regenerated on the baptismal font of liberty for all. … Now, we could march with a prouder step, and fight with more confidence. We were no longer merely the soldiers of a political controversy, to be decided by the fate of arms. We were now the missionaries of a great work of redemption, the armed liberators of millions of men bent beneath the brutalizing yoke of slavery. The war was ennobled; the object was higher.”

War United States Slavery Liberation Civil War Patriotism Rebirth American Civil War Emancipation Abolition

Book:Four Years with the Army of the Potomac

Source: Four Years with the Army of the Potomac

“Words of Emancipation didn't arrive until the middle of June so they called it Juneteenth. So that was it, the night of Juneteenth celebration, his mind went on. The celebration of a gaudy illusion.”

Freedom Liberty Slavery Emancipation Juneteenth

Book:Juneteenth

Source: Juneteenth

“Some things are not worth dying for, but without them life is not worth living.”

Life Purpose Freedom Slavery Suicide Meaning Meaningless Suicidal Emancipation Slaves

Author:Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I thought about how Juneteenth is a holiday that inspires so much celebration, born from circumstances imbued with so much tragedy. Enslavers in Texas, and across the South, attempted to keep Black people in bondage for months, and theoretically years, after their freedom had been granted. Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting.”

Freedom History Democracy Slavery Celebration African Americans Blacks Emancipation African American History Juneteenth

Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Source: How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

Slavery Quotes

Related topics

Slavery Quotes