Abolitionist Quotes - Page 3

• There are those who view the abolitionists as just maniacs, apolitical fanatics who helped to cause the war, and Lincoln is the model of responsible statesmanship. I think that is a misconception, the idea that Lincoln knows what's possible and the abolitionists don't.

  Eric Foner

  War, Thinking, Ideas

  "Eric Foner on the Perennial Relevance of Abraham Lincoln". Interview with Aaron Leonard, historynewsnetwork.org. October 4, 2010.

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• In a democratic society, as Max Weber said, what is possible is only possible because some people have demanded the impossible. The abolitionists helped to create a public discourse in which men like Lincoln become possible. That doesn't mean Lincoln is an abolitionist. It means there is a public opinion out there which is being influenced by antislavery sentiment.

  Eric Foner

  Mean, Men, People

  "Eric Foner on the Perennial Relevance of Abraham Lincoln". Interview with Aaron Leonard, historynewsnetwork.org. October 4, 2010.

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• 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?

  Rose Macaulay

  Hate, War, Greed

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• There are Harvard grads, free thinkers, feminists, abolitionists, well-to-do people who want to go write poetry and live on a farm and cook and laugh and have a good time. As they themselves described it, it was an "inward facing" community. They were focusing on making a better existence for themselves, which I think is also the driving force of 20th century communalism in the US, the thought being that the world is corrupt, and we're going to build this little garden of innocence.

  Christine Jennings

  Writing, Garden, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Slave rebellions, especially the [1791] Haitian Revolution, had an ongoing effect on the ways in which abolitionists talked about ending slavery.

  Manisha Sinha

  Ongoing, Slavery, Way

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• I hear you have abolitionists here. We have a few in Illinois, but we shot one the other day.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Illinois, Government, Shots

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• In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.

  Zephyr Teachout

  Dirty, Europe, White

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• I do not hesitate to say, that those who call themselves Abolitionists should at once effectually withdraw their support, both inperson and property, from the government of Massachusetts, and not wait until they constitute a majority of one, before they suffer the right to prevail through them. I think that it is enough if they have God on their side, without waiting for that other one. Moreover, any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Men, Thinking, Support

  Civil Disobedience (1849) See Coolidge 2; Douglass 7; Andrew Jackson 7; John Knox 1; Wendell Phillips 3

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• Harriet Beecher Stowe was thirty-nine when she began Uncle Tom's Cabin. She had given birth to seven children and seen one die. She wrote her book to be serialized in an abolitionist newspaper. Much of it she composed on the kitchen table in between the cooking, mending, tending to her house.

  Sophy Burnham

  Uncles, Children, Book

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• I was in favour of the death penalty, and disposed to regard abolitionists as people whose hearts were bigger than their heads. Four years of close study of the subject gradually dispelled that feeling. In the end I became convinced that the abolitionists were right in their conclusions...and that far from the sentimental approach leading into their camp and the rational one into that of the supporters, it was the other way about.

  Ernest Gowers

  Heart, Years, People

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• The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement.

  Elbert Guillory

  Party, Movement, Republican

  "‘Free at Last’: La. State Senator Explains Why He Recently Left the ‘Government Plantation’ & Joined GOP in Powerful Video". www.theblaze.com. June 18, 2013.

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• Abolitionists were men of sharp angles. Organizing them was like binding crooked sticks in a bundle.

  Jane Swisshelm

  Men, Sticks, Angle

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• Hillary Clinton began a New York thank-you tour Friday by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. No wonder Arkansas never liked her. She hasn't been in office three days and already she's an abolitionist.

  Argus Hamilton

  Friday, New York, College

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• Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.

  Hal Holbrook

  Daughter, New York, Leader

  "Hal Holbrook of MARK TWAIN TONIGHT, Coming to Riverside's Fox Performing Arts Center". Interview with Audrey Liebross, www.broadwayworld.com. January 12, 2015.

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• One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed.

  Quentin Tarantino

  Mother, Song, War

  Source: www.coupdemainmagazine.com

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• In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hundred years ago, Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes. Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings, to bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today's globe.

  Adam Hochschild

  Determination, Years, Two

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• In one point of view, we, the abolitionists and colored people, should meet [the Dred Scott] decision, unlooked for and monstrous as it appears, in a cheerful spirit. This very attempt to blot out forever the hopes of an enslaved people may be one necessary link in the chain of events preparatory to the downfall and complete overthrow of the whole slave system.

  Frederick Douglass

  Views, People, Decision

  Frederick Douglass (2000). “Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings”, p.348, Chicago Review Press

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• I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

  Ava DuVernay

  Prison, Horrible, Working It

  "Biography/Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• Who freed the slaves? To the extent that they were ever u2018freed,' they were freed by the Thirteenth Amendment, which was authored and pressured into existence not by Lincoln but by the great emancipators nobody knows, the abolitionists and congressional leaders who created the climate and generated the pressure that goaded, prodded, drove, forced Lincoln into glory by associating him with a policy that he adamantly opposed for at least fifty-four of his fifty-six years of his life.

  Lerone Bennett, Jr.

  Years, Leader, Climate

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• Many abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Learning, Rights, Women's Rights

  Journal, June, 1860.

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• The seeds of freedom . . . have now been scattered where despotism and tyranny ranked and ruled, will be watered by the enlivening dews of God's clemency, till the reapers abolitionists shall shout the harvest home.

  Henry McNeal Turner

  Home, Dew, Harvest

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• I escaped from slavery and became a leading abolitionist and speaker.

  Frederick Douglass

  Slavery, Speakers

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• As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across.

  Del LaGrace Volcano

  Believe, Technology, Journey

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• Throughout the three decades preceding the Civil War, the anticlerical ethos of the radical abolitionists was used against them by religious opponents of emancipation, who . . . even described abolitionism itself as an atheist plot.

  Susan Jacoby

  Religious, Atheist, War

  Susan Jacoby (2005). “Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism”, p.70, Macmillan

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• The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.

  Marcus Rediker

  Real, Britain And America, Slave Ships

  Marcus Rediker (2007). “The Slave Ship: A Human History”, p.13, Penguin

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