Slaveholders Quotes

• The moment a man claims a right to control the will of a fellow being by physical force, he is at heart a slaveholder.

  Henry Clarke Wright

  Heart, Men, Tyrants

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• Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

  Bill Maher

  Mean, Thinking, Religion

  "Religulous". www.imdb.com. 2008.

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• Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

  Harriet Ann Jacobs

  Class, Snakes, Weather

  Harriet Ann Jacobs (2006). “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Literary Touchstone Classic”, p.194, Prestwick House Inc

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• 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

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• It was not Christianity which freed the slave: Christianity accepted slavery; Christian ministers defended it; Christian merchants trafficked in human flesh and blood, and drew their profits from the unspeakable horrors of the middle passage. Christian slaveholders treated their slaves as they did the cattle in their fields: they worked them, scourged them, mated them , parted them, and sold them at will. Abolition came with the decline in religious belief, and largely through the efforts of those who were denounced as heretics.

  Hypatia Bradlaugh Bonner

  Christian, Religious, Blood

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• The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South.

  Susan B. Anthony

  Men, Guilt, He Man

  Lynn Sherr, Susan B. Anthony (1995). “Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words”, Crown

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• I assert most unhesitatingly, that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes—a justifier of the most appalling barbarity…a shelter under…which the darkest, foulest, grossest, and most infernal deeds of slaveholders find the strongest protection

  Frederick Douglass

  Covering, Shelter, Deeds

  Frederick Douglass (1846). “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave”, p.77

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• Our moneyed men have ruled us for the past thirty years. Under the flag of the slaveholder they hoped to destroy our liberty.

  Denis Kearney

  Past, Men, Years

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• This is emphatically an age of discoveries; but I will venture the assertion, that none but an American slaveholder could have discovered that a man born in a country was not a citizen of it.

  William Wells Brown

  Country, Men, Discovery

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• Be faithful, be vigilant, be untiring in your efforts to break every yoke, and let the oppressed go free. Come what may - cost what it may - inscribe on the banner which you unfurl to the breeze, as your religious and political motto - "NO COMPROMISE WITH SLAVERY! NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS

  William Lloyd Garrison

  Religious, Effort, Political

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• For of all slaveholders with whom I have ever met, religious slaveholders are the worst. I have ever found them the meanest and basest, the most cruel and cowardly, of all others.

  Frederick Douglass

  Religious, Found, Mets

  Frederick Douglass (2013). “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave”, p.103, Simon and Schuster

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• We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  Inspiring, Women, 4th Of July

  Declaration of Sentiments, First Woman's Rights

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• It, sometimes, suits the slaveholders to claim, that their slavery is an exclusively State concern; and that the North has, therefore, nothing to do with it.

  Gerrit Smith

  Slavery, Suits, Sometimes

  Gerrit Smith (1856). “Speeches of Gerrit Smith in Congress”, p.22

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• Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about.

  Bill Maher

  Mean, Thinking, Virtue

  "Religulous". www.imdb.com. 2008.

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• It is not the fault of the slaveholder that he is cruel, so much as it is the fault of the system under which he lives. He cannot withstand the influence of habit and associations that surround him. Taught from earliest childhood, by all that he sees and hears that the rod is for the slave's back, he will not be apt to change his opinions in maturer years.

  Solomon Northup

  Years, Childhood, Association

  Solomon Northup (2008). “Twelve Years a Slave”, p.206, Applewood Books

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• They who are continually shocked by slavery have some right to be shocked by the violent death of the slaveholder, but no others.Such will be more shocked by his life than by his death.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Slavery, Violence, Violent

  Henry David Thoreau (2014). “Citizen Thoreau: Walden, Civil Disobedience, Life Without Principle, Slavery in Massachusetts, A Plea for Captain John Brown”, p.250, Graphic Arts Books

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• Slaveholders deployed so-called scientific racism to justify racial slavery.

  Manisha Sinha

  Racism, Slavery, Justify

  Source: www.bostonglobe.com

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• There is very little moral mixture in the 'Antislavery' feeling of this country. A great deal is abstract philanthropy; part is hatred of slaveholders; a great part is jealousy for white labor, very little is consciousness of wrong done and the wish to right it.

  George William Curtis

  Country, War, White

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• To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way.

  Stephen Ambrose

  African American, Way, Inferiors

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• I link dar's many a slaveholder'll git to Heaven. Dey don't know no better. Dey acts up to de light dey hab.

  Harriet Tubman

  Light, Heaven, Links

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• A Christian can believe that God 'ordained' the 'powers that be' - including political rulers and slaveholders - for purposes too deep for us to understand fully, and that while they last we must provisionally accept them; but that they were not meant to last forever.

  Joseph Sobran

  Christian, Believe, Forever

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• What shall be said, then, of those who insist upon ignoring the question of slavery as not involved in this deadly feud, and maintain that the only issue is, the support of the government and the preservation of the Union? Surely, they are "fools and blind"; for it is slaveholders alone who have conspired to seize the one, and overturn the other. As long as the enslavement of a single human being is sanctioned in the land, the curse of God will rest upon it.

  William Lloyd Garrison

  Land, Issues, Government

  "The War — Its Cause and Cure". teachingamericanhistory.org. May 03, 1861.

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• One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognizes a human being in a slave.

  Angelina Grimke

  Heart, Slavery, Race Relations

  34 Copy quote

• It [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church. . . . With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh.

  William Lloyd Garrison

  Hands, Heaven, Religion

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• Let no man of us budge one step, and let slaveholders come to beat us from our country. America is more our country, than it is the whites-we have enriched it with our blood and tears. The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears.

  David Walker

  Country, Men, Blood

  David Walker (1965). “David Walker's Appeal: In Four Articles, Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America”

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