Antislavery Quotes

“If I can succeed in getting you away from here, it will be a good act that I shall like to think of all my life. And I shall succeed, Platt; I’m bound to do it. ... I’m with you, life or death.”
― Solomon Northup, Twelve Years a Slave

“I tell you I can’t read a book, but I can read de people.”
― Sojourner Truth

“If you hold your hand closed, nothing good can come in. The open hand is blessed, for it gives in abundance, even as it receives.”
― Biddy Mason

“If we had learned anything over the last decade, it was that there was no other way to defeat slavery, except with a willingness to die for it. We had learned what the Negroes long knew. And thus we merely did what the Negroes themselves had done over and over in the past—in Haiti, in the mountains of Jamaica, and in the swamps of Virginia—but could not do out there on the plains of Kansas. We did what we wanted the Negroes to do in Kansas. By slaying those five pro-slavers on the Pottawatomie that night, we placed hundreds, thousands, of other white men in the same position that we along amongst the whites had held for years: for now every white man in Kansas, anti-slaver and pro-slaver alike, had to be ready to die for his cause.”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“Those who stayed on and endured our hardship and deprivation and the almost daily risk to our lives were of necessity physically hardy fellows, but they were also the most courageous men out there then and the most dedicated to the anti-slavery cause. Father would have said it was because they were dedicated to the anti-slavery cause. 'It's a mistake,' he told me, 'to that that bullies make the best fighters, or that violent, cruel men would be fitter to oppose the Southerners than our mild, abolitionist Christians. Give me men of good principles, God-fearing men, men who respect themselves and each other, and with a dozen of them I'll oppose any hundred of such men as these Border Ruffians!”
― Russell Banks, Cloudsplitter

“On this, both right-libertarians and left-libertarians agree...the doctrine of self-ownership. Each person has exclusive ownership of herself [or himself] and nobody has any property rights in another person.”
― Peter Vallentyne, The Origins of Left-Libertarianism: An Anthology of Historical Writings