Anton Chekhov Quotes

Write about this man who, drop by drop, squeezes the slave's blood out of himself until he wakes one day to find the blood of a real human being--not a slave's--coursing through his veins.

Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery, none but ourselves can free our minds!

Liberation is not deliverance.

I think one of the greatest gifts you can give to someone is just access to the possibility of freedom that you don't have to be totally depressed and enslaved by your own environment.

We shall never secure emancipation from the tyranny of our oppressor until we have achieved it in our own souls.

Many of the former Slaves are only nominally free, for the servile spirit is still within them.

I am an Abolitionist. I am for speedy, immediate Abolition. I care not what caste, creed or color, slavery may assume. Whether it be personal or political, mental or corporeal, intellectual or spiritual, I am for its instant, its total Abolition

I should have done violence to my convictions of duty, had I not made use of all the lawful means in my power to liberate those people, and assist them to become men and women, rather than leave them in the condition of chattels personal.

I had crossed the line of which I had so long been dreaming. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom, I was a stranger in a strange land, and my home after all was down in the old cabin quarter, with the old folks, and my brothers and sisters. But to this solemn resolution I came; I was free, and they should be free also; I would make a home for them in the North, and the Lord helping me, I would bring them all there.

… it would be perfectly right for anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage.

… the best way to aid the human being to emancipate himself is to educate him

I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom

A slave cannot be freed, save he do it himself. Nor can you enslave a free man; the very most you can do is kill him!

For some slaves, the first step out of bondage is to learn to see their lives with new eyes. Their reality is a social world where they have their place and some assurance of a subsistence diet. Born into slavery, they cannot easily redefine their lives outside the frame of enslavement.

The best way to progress is the path of freedom.

Those of us who always abhorred slavery as an atheistical iniquity, gladly we join in the exulting chorus of humanity over its downfall.

In raising a people from slavery to freedom, you have called them to act on a new theatre; and it is a necessary part of your business, to teach them how to perform their parts.

I have only to speak for myself; to speak for freedom for myself; to determine for freedom for myself; and in doing so, I speak and determine for the freedom of every slave on every plantation, and for the fugitives on my right hand.

There is only one decision you need to make: You are either working at your Freedom or you are accepting your bondage.

Words empower us, move us beyond our suffering, and set us free.

Who says I can't be free from all of the things that I used to be?

If a piece of burning charcoal be placed on a man’s head, see how he struggles to throw it off. Similar will be the struggle for freedom of those who really understand that they are slaves of nature.

The point of flight. To get rid of oneself. That was reason enough to fly.

But I found that disappointing people is a good thing, because disapproval is freedom.

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.