“It is easier to build strong
children than to repair broken men.”
“I prefer to be true to myself,
even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be
false, and to incur my own abhorrence.”
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”
“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be
a slave.”
Where justice is denied, where
poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made
to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade
them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
“...I therefore hate the corrupt,
slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical
Christianity of the land... I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the
boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. Never was there a
clearer case of 'stealing the livery of the court of heaven to serve the devil
in.' I am filled with unutterable loathing when I contemplate the religious
pomp and show, together with the horrible inconsistencies, which every where
surround me. We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for
missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the
blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to
be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. . . . The slave auctioneer’s bell
and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the
heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master.
Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together.
The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters
and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer
in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies of men
erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each
other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the
pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity.
Here we have religion and robbery the allies of each other—devils dressed in
angels’ robes, and hell presenting the semblance of paradise.”
“I would unite with anybody to do
right and with nobody to do wrong"
“Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have
found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon
them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or
blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of
those whom they oppress.”
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