Mark Twain Quotes About Slavery

• The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a priveleged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

  Mark Twain

  Class, Names, Perception

  Mark Twain, Bernard L. Stein (1983). “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court”, p.239, Univ of California Press

• In my schoolboy days I had no aversion to slavery. I was not aware there was anything wrong about it. No-one arraigned it in my hearing; the local papers said nothing against it; the local pulpit taught us that God approved it, that it was a holy thing, and that the doubter need only look in the Bible if he wished to settle his mind.

  Mark Twain

  Taught Us, Mind, Hearing

  Mark Twain, Milton Meltzer (2002). “Mark Twain Himself: A Pictorial Biography”, p.17, University of Missouri Press

• There was no place in the land where the seeker could not find some small budding sign of pity for the slave. No place in all the land but one - the pulpit. It yielded last; it always does. It fought a strong and stubborn fight, and then did what it always does, joined the procession - at the tail end. Slavery fell. The slavery texts in the Bible remained; the practice changed; that was all.

  Mark Twain

  Strong, Fighting, Land

  Mark Twain, Paul Baender (1973). “What Is Man? and Other Philosophical Writings”, p.74, Univ of California Press

• In all the ages the Roman Church has owned slaves, bought and sold slaves, authorized and encouraged her children to trade in them. . . . There were the texts; there was no mistaking their meaning; . . . she was doing in all this thing what the Bible had mapped out for her to do. So unassailable was her position that in all the centuries she had no word to say against human slavery.

  Mark Twain

  Children, Religion, Age

You May Also Like:

Charles Dickens

Ernest Hemingway

Oscar Wilde

Edgar Allan Poe

Jack London

Hal Holbrook

William Faulkner