Abolitionism Quotes

“Educate your children, educate yourself, in the love for the freedom of others, for only in this way will your own freedom not be a gratuitous gift from fate. You will be aware of its worth and will have the courage to defend it.”
― Joaquim Nabuco

“Liberty is no less a blessing because oppression has so long darkened the mind that it can not appreciate it.”
― Lucretia Mott

“Animal welfarism is a blatant lie. Anyone who truly cares for the welfare of another, would never dream of exploiting them. For just as when slavery is deeply set into the psyche of a nation, those crying for slave welfare and not abolitionism, argue in favour of slavery and exploitation, and thus push eventual abolitionism further into the future.”
― Mango Wodzak, The Eden Fruitarian Guidebook

“Having seen all this you can choose to look the other way, but you can never say again, 'I did not know.”
― William Wilberforce

“Unless disability and animal justice are incorporated into our other movements for liberation, ableism and anthropocentrism will be left unchallenged, available for use by systems of domination and oppression.”
― Sunaura Taylor, Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation

“Abolitionism was a movement to end private slavery. Libertarianism is a movement to end private and public slavery.”
― Jakub Bożydar Wiśniewski, The Pith of Life: Aphorisms in Honor of Liberty

“It should be held as an eternal truth, that what is morally wrong can never be politically right.”
― Hannah More

“... if suffering warrants special moral concern, the truth is that we should never forget about its existence. For even if we had abolished suffering throughout the living world, there would still be a risk that it might reemerge, and this risk would always be worth reducing.”
― Magnus Vinding, Suffering-Focused Ethics: Defense and Implications

“[T]he West did not invent slavery; the West ended slavery.”
― Pat Buchanan

“When we heard at first [John Brown] was dead, one of my townsmen observed that "he died as the fool dieth"; which, pardon me, for an instant suggested a likeness in him dying to my neighbor living. Others, craven-hearted, said disparagingly, that "he threw his life away" because he resisted the government. Which ways have they thrown their lives, pray? ---such would praise a man for attacking singly an ordinary band of thieves and murderers. I hear another ask, Yankee-like, "What will he gain by it?" as if he expected to fill his pockets by their enterprise. Such a one has no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a "surprise" party, if he does not gain a new pair of boots, or a vote of thanks, it must be a failure. "But he won't gain anything by it." Well, no, I don;t suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day for being hung, take the year round; but he stands a chance to save a considerable part of his soul- and what a soul!- when you do not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk than a quart of blood, but that is not the market heroes carry their blood to.”
― Henry David Thoreau, A Plea For Captain John Brown

“Middle-class gay white men argued that 'gay rights' should remain a legislative issue and that 'legally sanctioned gay marriage should be a primary concern for all of us.' Kunzel charts the ways that the forced forgetting of queer and trans prisoners was central to the coalescing of 'new gay norms,' 'gay respectability,' and homonormativity. This disciplining of the queer left was a racialized proect that coalesced around shoring up the privileges afforded by whiteness, gender normativity, and capital.”
― Eric A. Stanley, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex

“[…] Under such auspices, in 1835, he went to Canaan Academy, at Canaan, New Hampshire, Rev. William Scales, principal; he was kindly received into the family of George Kimball, Esq. There he first met Miss Julia Williams, formerly a pupil of Miss Prudence Crandall, Canterbury, Connecticut, who was imprisoned for teaching colored girls; Miss Williams subsequently became his wife. Among the pupils at the Academy were his old schoolmates, Alexander Crummell and Thomas S. Sydney. They joyfully entered upon their studies, penetrated with the hopes of a race to whom the higher branches of human learning had hitherto been a sealed book.

But the spirit of caste, which we have already spoken of, as being, in the rural districts, still stronger against the education of colored youth than in the cities, soon concentrated its malign influence upon this Academy.
In August of the same year (1835) a mob assembled in Canaan, and with the aid of ninety-five yoke of oxen and two days’ hard labor, finally succeeded in removing the Academy from its site and afterwards they destroyed it by fire. The same mob surrounded the house of Mr Kimball and fired shot into the room occupied by Garnet: to add to the mean atrocity of the act, he was at that time, in consequence of increasing lameness, obliged to use a crutch in walking, and was confined to his room by a fever. But neither sickness, nor infirmity, nor the howling of the mob could subdue his fiery spirit; he spent most of the day in casting bullets in anticipation of the attack, and when the mob finally came he replied to their fire with a double-barrelled shot-gun, blazing from his window, and soon drove the cowards away.

Henry Highland Garnet, A memorial discourse; delivered in the hall of the House of Representatives, Washington City, D.C. on Sabbath, February 12, 1865. With an introduction by James McCune Smith, M.D. (Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson, 1865), pp 29-30 [The quote is from Smith's biographical sketch of Garnet]”
― James McCune Smith, A Memorial Discourse By Reverend Henry Highland Garnet

“If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?”
― Lucretia Mott

“It is related of Buonaparte, that he one day rebuked a French lady for busying herself with politics. "Sire," replied she, "in a country where women are put to death, it is very natural that women should wish to know why." And, dear sisters, in a country where women are degraded and brutalized, and where their exposed persons bleed under the lash-- where they are sold in the shambles of "negro brokers"-- robbed of their heard earnings-- torn from their husbands, and forcibly plundered of their virtue and their offspring; surely in such a country, it is very natural that women should wish to know "the reason why"-- especially when these outrages of blood and nameless horror are practiced in violation of the principles of our Constitution. We do not, then, and cannot concede the position, that because this is a political subject women ought to fold their hands in idleness, and close their eyes and ears to the "horrible things" that are practiced in our land. The denial of our duty to act is a bold denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed "the white slaves of the North"-- for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.”
― Lucretia Mott