From the public-domain record · 81,371 quotes
Founders, statesmen and world leaders — cited from their collected works.
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Men, in their senses, do not take bowie-knives to kill mosquitoes, nor pistols to shoot flies; and the American passengers who thought proper to get up a mob to silence me, on board the “Cambria,” took the most effective method of telling…
A man is sometimes made great, by the greatness of the abuse a portion of mankind may think proper to heap upon him.
But the very contempt and scorn, the systematic and extravagant disparagement of which I was the object, served, perhaps, to magnify my few merits, and to render me of some account, whether deserving or not.
It has happened to me—as it has happened to most other men engaged in a good cause—often to be more indebted to my enemies than to my own skill or to the assistance of my friends, for whatever success has attended my labors.
Driven into semi-exile by civil and barbarous laws, and by a system which cannot be thought of without a shudder, I was fully justified in turning, if possible, the tide of the moral universe against the heaven-daring outrage.
Slavery is a crime, not against Englishmen, but against God, and all the members of the human family; and it belongs to the whole human family to seek its suppression.
I took my stand on the high ground of human brotherhood, and spoke to Englishmen as men, in behalf of men.
Coming generations in this country will applaud the spirit of this much abused republican friend of freedom.
They are the people who sympathize with Louis Kossuth and Mazzini, and with the oppressed and enslaved, of every color and nation, the world over.
The main object to which my labors in Great Britain were directed, was the concentration of the moral and religious sentiment of its people against American slavery.
I felt that I had a duty to perform—and that was, to labor and suffer with the oppressed in my native land.
But for this, I might at any time become a victim of this most cruel and scandalous enactment, and be doomed to end my life, as I began it, a slave.
As I walked through the building, the statuary did not fall down, the pictures did not leap from their places, the doors did not refuse to open, and the servants did not say, “We don’t allow niggers in here!
They looked as sour as vinegar, and as bitter as gall, when they found I was to be admitted on equal terms with themselves.
This species of aristocracy belongs preeminently to “the land of the free, and the home of the brave.” I have never found it abroad, in any but Americans.
Whatever may be said of the aristocracies here, there is none based on the color of a man’s skin.
They measure and esteem men according to their moral and intellectual worth, and not according to the color of their skin.
What a pity there was not some American democratic Christian at the door of his splendid mansion, to bark out at my approach, “They don’t allow niggers in here!” The truth is, the people here know nothing of the republican Negro hate…
When I go to church, I am met by no upturned nose and scornful lip to tell me, “We don’t allow niggers in here!
I find myself regarded and treated at every turn with the kindness and deference paid to white people.
I find no difficulty here in obtaining admission into any place of worship, instruction, or amusement, on equal terms with people as white as any I ever saw in the United States.
I gaze around in vain for one who will question my equal humanity, claim me as his slave, or offer me an insult.
I will continue to pray, labor, and wait, believing that she cannot always be insensible to the dictates of justice, or deaf to the voice of humanity.
