C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Slavery
Corrupted freemen are the worst of slaves.
Base is the slave that pays.
Nothing in the world is lawless except a slave.
How great would be our peril if our slaves began to number us!
It is an irrepressible conflict between opposing and enduring forces.
Good kings are slaves, and their people are free.
Not the Christian religion only, but nature herself, cries out against the state of slavery.
Slavery tolerates no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of opinion.
Freedom and slavery! the one is the name of virtue, and the other of vice, and both are acts of the will.
They (the blacks) had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.
Where slavery is there liberty cannot be, and where liberty is there slavery cannot be.
A soil whose air is deemed too pure for slaves to breathe in.
I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free.
No more slave states and no more slave territory.
That execrable sum of all villainies commonly called the slave-trade.
Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature.
In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve.
The man who gives me employment which I must have or suffer, that man is my master, let me call him what I will.
By the law of slavery, man, created in the image of God, is divested of the human character, and declared to be a mere chattel.
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.
Slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and vices; and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture.
Slavery it is that makes slavery; freedom, freedom. The slavery of women happened when the men were slaves of kings.
There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of slavery.
This is a world of compensations, and he who would be no slave must consent to have no slave. Those who deny freedom to others deserve it not for themselves, and, under a just God, they cannot long retain it.
Measure slavery by the golden rule, and where is it?***It stands in the way of that automatic instinct of progress which is eternal in the human race and irresistible in human history.
Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.
The very mudsills of society.***We call them slaves.***But I will not characterize that class at the north with that term; but you have it. It is there, it is everywhere, it is eternal.
Resolved, That the compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell; involving both parties in atrocious criminality, and should be immediately annulled.
I never mean, unless some particular circumstances should compel me to do it, to possess another slave by purchase, it being among my first wishes to see some plan adopted by which slavery in this country may be abolished by law.
Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters.
Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.