James Henry Hammond Quotes

The right of holding slaves is clearly established by the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example. In the Old Testament …. Had the holding of slaves been a moral evil, it cannot be supposed, that the inspired Apostles, who feared not the faces of men, and were ready to lay down their lives in the cause of their God, would have tolerated it, for a moment, in the Christian Church …. The Christian golden rule, of doing to others, as we would they should do to us, has been urged as an unanswerable argument against holding slaves. But surely this rule is never to be urged against that order of things, which the Divine government has established.

However, I am willing to hear what you can produce from Scripture in favor of any kind of slavery.

When we turn to the New Testament, we find not one single passage at all calculated to disturb the conscience of an honest slaveholder.

Is not the meager, thin, long, chop-fallen, half-starved savage, as you find him a prisoner of war in negro land, a barbarian, compared to the happy, contented, well developed, strong, hearty, well clothed, well fed, negro slave in his Christianized state of American Slavery?

If you give your life to a cause in which you believe, and if it is right and just, and if your life comes to an end as a result of this, then your life could not have been spent in a more redemptive way. I think that is what my husband has done.

Anytime you're dealing with moral issues, in a government position, you're dealing with some sticky stuff because everybody's morality is different. So you may be a Christian and say "my morality is based on the Bible." But if it doesn't line up with the way they think it should line up, now you got a problem with them. And then you can say, "I'm more in line with the Bible," but you don't care about the Bible, so they are like 'why are you imposing these difficult rules on me? I don't even believe in that.' So you just have an interesting and sticky situation.

To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity.

The right of holding slaves is clearly established in the Holy Scriptures, both by precept and example.

You look back in time to when there was slavery and you think 'how did people even remotely believe that this was a good idea?'.It's incomprehensible for us to think of what the mindset was 100 or 200 years ago. I hope to make the present as incomprehensible to the future as the past is to us.

You have told me, O God, to believe in hell. But you have forbidden me to think...of any man as damned

I believe in the holy Koran. It says we declare ourselves to be righteous Muslims and do not take part in wars, or in no way fashion or form take the lives of humans unless it's a holy war declared by God himself.

If a man really believes that God once upheld slavery; that he commanded soldiers to kill women and babes; that he believed in polygamy; that he persecuted for opinion's sake; that he will punish forever, and that he hates an unbeliever, the effect in my judgment will be bad. It always has been bad. This belief built the dungeons of the Inquisition. This belief made the Puritan murder the Quaker.

My favorite Founding Fathers, Christians like John Adams, were absolutely appalled by slavery, and did not own slaves. I think we're going to have to call on God's grace not only for slavery, but for what we're doing now with abortions.

By the way that we think and by the way that we believe in things, in that way our world is created.

People often say that Trump "speaks the truth," right? But I think what really is happening is he's become a symbol of the kind of cynicism the American public feels towards politicians. He embodies, and he's mobilizing, that cynicism. Because people have no faith in politics anymore. People actually believe that politics is dead, because it's bought and sold.

Believe me, I didn't think there was some princely family I belonged to.

I come up with new ambitions all the time - and the coolest thing is, I think of something I want to do, and I don't really imagine it as "Oh, I've never done that." I think of it as, "Oh, I haven't done that yet." I literally believe I'm going to do everything I set out to do, which is a pretty amazing feeling.

If something is meant to be, it's gonna work. If two people believe in something really strongly, I think a longdistance relationship is easy. They just make the time to be together. And you have to remember that any relationship is going to be hard...mostly because you're two different people and you have to figure stuff out.

If I were to believe in a god l would believe in gods. I think monotheism is the really ghastly thing. That is the absolutely staggering to me misapprehension.

I WAS a mermaid in my past-life! I definitely was. I don't know why I'm obsessed with them that much, which is why I think that somehow in my past-life I must have just lived underwater or something. Maybe I was a fish or a dolphin, but I do believe in mermaids.

I don't think most people take honest well. They prefer the games. They want to believe the pretty lies.

Some people think it's naive to think we can make love our new bottom line. What I believe is naive is thinking human civilization as we know it will survive another two hundred years if we do not.

Justice Jefferson has a blind spot on race. You know, more than a blind spot. A terrible blemish on his legacy, slavery, for which he's properly excoriated. So, I think [Louis] Brandeis has done this as well.

I thought poetry could change everything, could change history and could humanize, and I think that the illusion is very necessary to push poets to be involved and to believe, but now I think that poetry changes only the poet.

I think people talk too much; that's the truth of the matter. I do. I don't believe in words. People use too many words and usually wrongly. I am sure that in the distant future people will talk much less and in a more essential way. If people talk a lot less, they will be happier. Don't ask me why.