A Quote by Tennessee Celeste Claflin
... no community where more than one-half of the adults are disfranchised and otherwise incapacitated by law and custom, can be free from great vices. Purity is inconsistent with slavery.
Related Quotes
Were the judgments of mankind correct, custom would be regulated by the good. But it is often far otherwise in point of fact; for, whatever the many are seen to do, forthwith obtains the force of custom. But human affairs have scarcely ever been so happily constituted as that the better course pleased the greater number. Hence the private vices of the multitude have generally resulted in public error, or rather that common consent in vice which these worthy men would have to be law.
The whole drift of our law is toward the absolute prohibition of all ideas that diverge in the slightest form from the accepted platitudes, and behind that drift of law there is a far more potent force of growing custom, and under that custom there is a natural philosophy which erects conformity into the noblest of virtues and the free functioning of personality into a capital crime against society.
Every great sin ought to rouse a great anger. Mob law is better than no law at all. A community which rises in its wrath to punish with misdirected anger a great wrong is in a healthier moral condition than a community which looks upon its perpetration with apathy and unconcern.
The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.
Now my record deal helps me to do things for free or give more time to my community than I could otherwise.
[A]ll popular and well-mixed governments [republics] . . . are ever established by wise and good men, and can never be upheld otherwise than by virtue: The worst men always conspiring against them, they must fall, if the best have not power to preserve them. . . . [and] unless they be preserved in a great measure free from vices . . . .
It is a debt we owe to the purity of our religion to show that it is at variance with that law which warrants slavery.
It takes far more courage to violate a custom than a law.
A democracy cannot flourish half rich and half poor, any more than it can flourish half free and half slave.
But are sailors, frequenters of fiddlers' greens, without vices? No; but less often than with landsmen do their vices, so called, partake of crookedness of heart, seeming less to proceed from viciousness than exuberance of vitality after long constraint: frank manifestations in accordance with natural law.
Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime, and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.
Slavery, if it can be legalized at all, can be legalized only by positive legislation. Natural law gives it no aid. Custom imparts to it no legal sanction.
And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery
No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
Amongst all other vices there is none I hate more than cruelty, both by nature and judgment, as the extremest of all vices.
