Top 35 Abolitionist Quotes & Sayings

I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible.

The notion of women being written out of history is as old as the Bible, but it always seems more galling when it is the history of progressive movements - such as the abolitionist campaign in Britain or the fight for African-American civil rights - in which the role of women has been diminished.

Louis Brandeis beloved uncle, Lewis Dembitz, was an ardent abolitionist. His mother was an abolitionist in Kentucky at a time when Brandeis remembered hearing the shot from the confederate soldiers after the second battle of Bull Run. Amazing to think that he heard that and I studied with one of his last law clerks in college. And that encapsulates almost all of American history.

In his fierce, bold determination to see the lives of modern-day slaves up close, Benjamin Skinner reminds me of the British abolitionist of two hundred years ago, Zachary Macaulay, who once traveled on a slave ship across the Atlantic, taking notes. Skinner goes everywhere, from border crossings to brothels to bargaining sessions with dealers in human beings, to bring us this vivid, searing account of the wide network of human trafficking and servitude which spans today's globe.

One of the songs that stayed in my head that I really considered a lot was an old folk song called 'John Brown' - not the abolitionist John Brown, but the one that Bob Dylan has covered and sung before. It's about a boy coming home from the Civil War, or maybe World War I even, and about his Mother seeing him all destroyed.

We've actually bought quite a number of historical pieces. We are doing a piece on the abolitionists, Harper's Ferry and the abolitionist John Brown with Paul Giamatti.

Viewing the man from the genuine abolitionist ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed cold, tardy, weak and unequal to the task. But, viewing him from the sentiments of his people, which as a statesman he was bound to respect, then his actions were swift, bold, radical and decisive. Taking the man in the whole, balancing the tremendous magnitude of the situation, and the necessary means to ends, Infinite Wisdom has rarely sent a man into the world more perfectly suited to his mission than Abraham Lincoln.

The Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement.

It’s time for a 21st-century abolitionist movement in the U.S and around the world.

Somehow it has been forgotten that the Republican party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement, with one simple creed: that slavery is a violation of the rights of man.

As a gender variant visual artist I access 'technologies of gender' in order to amplify rather than erase the hermaphroditic traces of my body. I name myself. A gender abolitionist. A part time gender terrorist. An intentional mutation and intersex by design, (as opposed to diagnosis), in order to distinguish my journey from the thousands of intersex individuals who have had their 'ambiguous' bodies mutilated and disfigured in a misguided attempt at 'normalization'. I believe in crossing the line as many times as it takes to build a bridge we can all walk across.

Strangely enough, the legend of John Brown, who was clearly crazy, helped the abolitionist cause and is thought to have precipitated the American Civil War.

Hillary Clinton began a New York thank-you tour Friday by calling for the abolition of the Electoral College. No wonder Arkansas never liked her. She hasn't been in office three days and already she's an abolitionist.

What does it look like to build a city, state, or nation invested in communities thriving rather than their death and destruction? To ask this question is the first act of an abolitionist.

The stance I took was there is no room for racial bias anywhere in sports. I believe that was basically all I said about it. Certainly I was cast as an abolitionist. Death threats came. Hate mail came.

In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.

There are issues the EPA should be dealing with. When I talk about the EPA and its role with the states, it's not an abolitionist view, that we don't need that agency. It's that the agency should act within the outlines established by Congress.

I came from an intellectual family. Most were doctors, preachers, teachers, businessmen. My grandfather was a small businessman. His father was an abolitionist doctor, and his father was an immigrant from Germany.

In a democratic society, as Max Weber said, what is possible is only possible because some people have demanded the impossible. The abolitionists helped to create a public discourse in which men like Lincoln become possible. That doesn't mean Lincoln is an abolitionist. It means there is a public opinion out there which is being influenced by antislavery sentiment.

In such a condition of affairs, the practical difference between the abolitionist and the sympathizer, to the man who lost his slave and could not recover it, was very nebulous.

I have always hated slavery, I think as much as any Abolitionist.

Enslaving each other was what human beings had done for ages. And the abolitionist movement was greeted with incredulity. Conservative spokesmen ridiculed the abolitionists as liberals, progressives, do-gooders, meddlers, and activists.

A staunch abolitionist, Hamilton was one of the founding members of the New York Manumission Society. He was a trustee and namesake of Hamilton-Oneida Academy, an upstate New York school dedicated to educating Native-American boys.

Harriet Beecher Stowe was thirty-nine when she began Uncle Tom's Cabin. She had given birth to seven children and seen one die. She wrote her book to be serialized in an abolitionist newspaper. Much of it she composed on the kitchen table in between the cooking, mending, tending to her house.

The success of the abolitionist movement lay in its making real for people in Britain and America the slave ship's pervasive and utterly instrumental terror, which was indeed its defining feature.

In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.

As Frederick Douglas, the famous abolitionist, said: "power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has and it never will." You need the truth, and you also need a demand, and you need to bring that demand into the realm of electoral politics. If you don't do that, it's very hard to get such an entrenched machine to move.

I have always hated slavery, I think, as much as any abolitionist. I have been an Old Line Whig. I have always hated it, but I have always been quiet about it until this new era of the introduction of the Nebraska Bill began.

The most important form of incremental change is the decision by the individual to become vegan. Veganism, or the eschewing of all animal products, is more than a matter of diet or lifestyle; it is a political and moral statement in which the individual accepts the principle of abolition in her own life. Veganism is the one truly abolitionist goal that we can all achieve - and we can achieve it immediately, starting with our next meal.

I am an abolitionist. What does this mean? Abolitionist resistance and resilience draws from a legacy of black-led anti-colonial struggle in the United States and throughout the Americas, including places like Haiti, the first black republic founded on the principles of anti-colonialism and black liberation.

I was a woman before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for the women.

I escaped from slavery and became a leading abolitionist and speaker.

None of the black abolitionist newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1827, was in existence after the Civil War.

John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.

If I had to write down the most important people in the history of this planet, No.1 would be (abolitionist) John Brown. Why? Because he's a white man who said he would die for the cause, because they could take him, but they weren't going to take his grandchildren. That brother was beautiful.