Top 5 Quotes & Sayings by Hinton Rowan Helper

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Hinton Rowan Helper.
Last updated on April 16, 2025.
Hinton Rowan Helper

Hinton Rowan Helper was an American Southern critic of slavery during the 1850s. In 1857, he published a book that he dedicated to the "nonslaveholding whites" of the South. The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, written partly in North Carolina but published when the author was in the North, argued that slavery hurt the economic prospects of non-slaveholders, and was an impediment to the growth of the entire region of the South. Anger over his book due to the belief he was acting as an agent of the North attempting to split Southerners along class lines led to Southern denunciations of "Helperism."

I have seen purer liqors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier women courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever visited.
Slavery tolerates no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of opinion.
California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America. — © Hinton Rowan Helper
California can and does furnish the best bad things that are obtainable in America.
Slavery is the parent of ignorance, and ignorance begets a whole brood of follies and vices; and every one of these is inevitably hostile to literary culture.
Slavery destroys, or vitiates, or pollutes, whatever it touches. No interest of society escapes the influence of its clinging curse. It makes Southern religion a stench in the nostrils of Christendom; it makes Southern politics a libel upon all the principles of republicanism; it makes Southern literature a travesty upon the honorable profession of letters.
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