Abraham Lincoln Quotes

Slavery is an institution for converting men into monkeys.

Slavery is now nowhere more patiently endured, than in countries once inhabited by the zealots of liberty.

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.

Slavery was a long slow process of dulling.

That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.

Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

Slavery doesn't have any positives.

As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. … Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance.

Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them, and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.

To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.

However you disguise slavery, it is slavery still. Its chains, though wreathed with roses, not only fasten on the body but rivet on the mind.

A slave-holder cannot hold a slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage for holding the slave.

There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.

Slavery always has, and always will produce insurrections wherever it exists, because it is a violation of the natural order of things.

Slavery is the most insane thing... I don't know that we've ever seen in history, but it's got to be close. The idea of slavery is such a base impulse. It's like, "I'm going to kidnap you and then you're going to do everything I want." Like, what? And then there's the historical aspect. It had a huge effect on human history.

Slavery is also as ancient as war, and war as human nature.

Poverty and slavery are thus only two forms ofthe same thing, the essence of which is that a man's energies are expended for the most part not on his own behalf but on that of others.

Slavery is the offspring of darkness.

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

Where there is a man who does not labor because another is compelled to work for him, there slavery is.

... even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the hands of the bondman without being mindful that he is such. O, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!

Slavery is ...an atrocious debasement of human nature.

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.