Quotes on Slavery

If you keep on buying things made by child slaves in such conditions, you are equally responsible for the perpetration of slavery.

When Southern people tell us they are no more responsible for the origin of slavery than we are, I acknowledge the fact. When it is said that the institution exists, and that it is very difficult to get rid of it in any satisfactory way, I can understand and appreciate the saying.

Americans are so enamored of equality that they would rather be equal in slavery than unequal in freedom.... The subjection of individuals will increase amongst democratic nations, not only in the same proportion as their equality, but in the same proportion as their ignorance.

It is a debt we owe to the purity of our religion to show that it is at variance with that law which warrants slavery.

Legality alone is no guide for a moral people. There are many things in this world that have been, or are, legal but clearly immoral. Slavery was legal. Did that make it moral? South Africa’s apartheid, Nazi persecution of Jews, and Stalinist and Maoist purges were all legal, but did that make them moral?

I think that slavery is wrong, morally, socially and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States - old as well as new - North as well as South.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.

I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.

Among the friends of Union, there is great diversity of sentiment and of policy in regard to slavery and the African race among us.

I can express all my views on the slavery question by quotations from Henry Clay.

I have sworn eternal opposition to slavery, and by the blessing of God, I will never go back.

Everyone is happy for the history of slavery to be investigated so long as the investigation examines the parts in which we look good.

Racism is not just slavery and Jim Crow. It is the daily violence that is enacted on our communities each and every day we live in this White supremacist society.

Colonialism is the cousin of slavery.

It is unevolved to want to celebrate the architects and defenders of slavery.

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Record contracts are just like - I'm gonna say the word - slavery. I would tell any young artist... don't sign.

Our redemption through the suffering of Christ is that deeper love within us which not only frees us from slavery to sin, but also secures for us the true liberty of the children of God, in order that we might do all things out of love rather than out of fear - love for him that has shown us such grace that no greater can be found.

Slavery is a wrong to each individual enslaved; and not merely to the first of a series. Natural law, therefore, as much forbids the enslaving of the child, as if the wrong of enslaving the parent had never been perpetrated.