William Lloyd Garrison Quotes

We may be personally free yet enslaved as a race.

I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice.

My country is the world; my countrymen are mankind.

I cannot consent to the injustice of my country taking precedence of mankind.

With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.

There can be no compromise with slavery; it means obedience or defiance, death or liberty.

I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.

The success of any great moral enterprise does not require numbers.

Urge immediate resistance.

It will be my glory to have lived in the best era of the world’s history.

Who can so properly be the inquest, and yet not the exponent of the views of the society, as its first-born?

I will accept nothing short of the abolition of slavery fully and without compromise.

With this association there is no compromise.

Neither god, nor man, nor the devil, nor any combination of them can call that innocent which God has pronounced guilty.

Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.

Every human being is as much entitled to defence against injustice, as to food and raiment.

William Lloyd Garrison Quotes part 2

Let the slaveholders be henceforth put distinctly under ban.

I will not believe myself a philanthropist until I love my brother man, however humble.

From the dark and benighted quarters of the land, the cry will still go up for the abolition of slavery.

The institution of slavery provides employment for the idle, diverts the mind from the pursuit of knowledge and virtue, and promotes a thirst for power and dominion.

The destiny of the colored people in this country is so interwoven with that of the white people, and so inseparable from them, that we cannot injure one without injuring the other.

The true significance of the abolition movement lies not so much in the means employed, as in the end aimed at.

Nationality, color, or sex can confer no privileges, establish no principles except as the wicked are protected and the righteous prohibited.

Our mission is to stand up for justice, confront the oppressor, and abolish the system of slavery in its entirety.

The true foundation of justice is the law of nature.

The true test of civilization is, not the census, nor the size of cities, nor the crops,—no, but the kind of men the country turns out.

No man can put a chain about the ankle of his fellow man without at last finding the other end fastened about his own neck.

Better have a whole generation of criminals for neighbors, than work or ten of the loathsome things that fatten upon the tears and groans of agony beneath the slave-whip.

Slavery I will not let alone.

What we need is an intense and determined effort to agitate against slavery everywhere.

The slave-holding States have made the Union the worst enemy of freedom it could possibly have had.

So great and crying are the abuses and evils of slaveholding, that relentless war ought to be waged against it.

Do we not consent so far as our influence extends to yield to the slaveholder our property, our character, our souls?

Slavery is a man-stealing and man-holding system.

You must educate your children to abhor and be on their guard against the slave system.

If the church of our country shall refuse to unfetter the limbs of her enslaved children and teach them the way of the Lord, it is vain to expect a revival of religion.

I will accept nothing but the immediate abolition of slavery.

I have need of the strongest epithets for the strongest abhorrence of slavery.

Such is the sad condition of the nation on account of its relation to slavery.

Slavery is devilish.

The abolitionist contends, and we think triumphantly, that there is no possible way in which those who are opposed to oppression and despotism can act with so much consistency and propriety.

The dangerous consequences of allowing the slaves to be regarded as property, are seen in the perpetration of the foulest and most shocking crimes.

Freedom can only be bought with a price.

Slavery is not a moral or social evil, but a great good.

We must understand that slavery is not only a physical tyranny, but a moral tyranny as well.