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"We must free the slaves or be ourselves subdued. The slaves were undeniably a element of strength to those who had their service, and we must decide whether that element should be with us or "against us". Emancipation, will strike at the heart of the rebellion."
Said to Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles. |
| Abraham Lincoln |
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| "When human hearts break and human hearts despair, then from the twilight of the past the great conquerors of distress and care, of disgrace and misery, of spiritual slavery and physical compulsion, look down on them and hold out their eternal hands to the despairing mortals." |
| Adolf Hitler |
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| A slave has but one master; an ambitious man has as many masters as there are people who may be useful in bettering his position. |
| Jean de la Bruyere |
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| Better to starve free than be a fat slave |
| Aesop |
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| For in reason, all government without the consent of the governed is the very definition of slavery. |
| Jonathan Swift |
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| I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time being ashamed. |
| Ralph Ellison |
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| I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted |
| Frederick Douglass |
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| In Genoa, the word, libertas can be read on the front of prisons and on the fetters of galley-slaves. The application of this motto is fine and just. |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau |
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| In thinking of America, I sometimes find myself admiring her bright blue sky-her grand old woods-her fertile fields-her beautiful rivers-her mighty lakes and star-crowned mountains. But my rapture is soon checked when I remember that all is cursed with the infernal spirit of slave-holding and wrong; When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten; That her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing. |
| Frederick Douglass |
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| Life without the courage for death is slavery |
| Seneca |
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| No defender of slavery, I concede that it has its benevolent aspects in lifting the Negro from savagery and helping prepare him for that eventual freedom which is surely written in the Book of Fate |
| Thomas Jefferson |
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| No man is free who is a slave to the flesh |
| Seneca |
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| Single acts of tyranny may be ascribed to the accidental opinion of a day; but a series of oppressions, begun at a distinguished period and pursued unalterably through every change of ministers, too plainly prove a deliberate, systematic plan of reducing [a people] to slavery. |
| Thomas Jefferson |
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| Slavery is now no where more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty |
| Samuel Johnson |
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| Slaves would be tyrants were the chance theirs |
| Victor Hugo |
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| The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name |
| Mark Twain |
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| The moment the slave resolves that he will no longer be a slave, his fetters fall. Freedom and slavery are mental states. |
| Mahatma Gandhi |
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