Quotes about Lynch Mob

Peter Balakian

History has shown that when justice is not served in a legal capacity, some people will take matters into their own hands.

New Orleans Picayune

Several loafers were lynched in Natchez last week upon various charges instituted by the Kangaroo court. The times grow warm; we can see another storm coming, not unlike that which prevailed in the days of the Murrel excitement. In Natchez, as in New Orleans, they are driving away all of the free negroes. What is a Kangaroo court, neighbor?

Elliott Abrams

At the United Nations, a lynch mob for Israel is always just a moment away.

Chavelier de Lorimier

… the gallows, surrounded by a witless crowd with an insatiable blood lust …

Ida B. Wells

Lynching is color line murder.

Abraham Lincoln

There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.

Coleman L. Blease

I would not use the influence of my office to deter citizens from punishing that nigger brute. I would have gladly resigned as governor and gone to Honea Path and led the mob myself.

In 1911 the citizens of Honea Path, SC, led by Joshua W. Ashleigh, the State Legislator representing the district and his son, the editor of the local newspaper, dismembered and lynched a Black man, Willis Jackson. Some South Carolinians were distressed and asked the Governor to initiate and investigation. See his later statement on lynching in 1930.

Abraham Lincoln

You suggest that a visit to the place of my nativity [Kentucky] might be pleasant to me. Indeed it would. But would it be safe? Would not the people lynch me?

Laura Wexler

Lynching—unlike simple murder—is a form of collective violence in which individuals act with the explicit or implicit support of the community, or at least without its condemnation.

Robert J. Ringer

A lynch mob is [unlimited] Majority Rule stripped of its fancy trappings and its facade of respectability.

Edward Abbey

All power rests on hierarchy: An army is nothing but a well-organized lynch mob.

James Hal Cone

One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.

P. J. O'Rourke

There's a whiff of the lynch mob or the lemming migration about any overlarge concentration of like-thinking individuals, no matter how virtuous their cause.

Henry Stuart Foote

Let him [Hale] visit the good state of Mississippi ... I invite him there, and will tell him beforehand ... that he could not go ten miles into the interior, before he would grace one of the tallest trees in the forest with a rope around his neck, with the approbation of every virtuous and patriotic citizen; and that, if necessary, I should myself assist in the operation.

In 1848 a pro-slavery mob in Washington DC Gamaliel Bailey's anti-slavery publication, The National Era, which soon thereafter was the publisher of the serialized Uncle Tom's Cabin. Senator John P. Hale introduced a bill in the Senate outlawing rioting in the District of Columbia. The Southern Senators objected violently and this served as a catalyst for one the for the most extensive and bitter public debate that had ever been held on the slavery issue.

Lynch Mob Quotes