Slavery Is Wrong Quotes

#1. Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away.

Abraham Lincoln

#2. I think that slavery is wrong, morally, socially and politically. I desire that it should be no further spread in these United States, and I should not object if it should gradually terminate in the whole Union.

Abraham Lincoln

#3. The anti-slavery party contends that slavery is wrong in itself, and the Government is a consolidated national democracy. We of the South contend that slavery is right, and that this is a confederate Republic of sovereign States.

Laurence M. Keitt

#4. There is not a man beneath the canopy of heaven, that does not know that slavery is wrong for him.

Frederick Douglass

#5. If slaves will make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong.

Howell Cobb

#6. Like Lincoln said: "If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong," and I feel the same way about the leftist dismantling of the West. If that's not wrong, then nothing is wrong.

David Mamet

#7. The mere toleration of the slave trade could not make slavery itself - the right of property in man - lawful any where; not even on board the slave ship. Toleration of a wrong is not law.

Lysander Spooner

#8. I think that if anything can be proved by natural theology, it is that slavery is morally wrong. God gave man a mouth to receive bread, hands to feed it, and his hand has a right to carry bread to his mouth without controversy.

Abraham Lincoln

#9. I appeal to you, my friends, as mothers: are you willing to enslave your children? You stare back with horror and indignation at such questions. But why, if slavery is not wrong to those upon whom it is imposed?

Angelina Grimke

#10. You know I dislike slavery; and you fully admit the abstract wrong of it.

Abraham Lincoln

#11. Slavery is a wrong to each individual enslaved; and not merely to the first of a series. Natural law, therefore, as much forbids the enslaving of the child, as if the wrong of enslaving the parent had never been perpetrated.

Lysander Spooner

#12. I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong. I can not remember when I did not so think and feel.

Abraham Lincoln

#13. You think slavery is right and ought to be extended; while we think it is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

Abraham Lincoln

#14. To be given dominion over another is a hard thing; to wrest dominion over another is a wrong thing; to give dominion of yourself to another is a wicked thing.

Toni Morrison

#15. I utterly reject the view that the Third World is doomed to poverty and starvation. Not only is this wrong, I think this attitude verges on the immoral, like thinking that slavery is an unalterable facet of the human condition so why bother doing anything about it?

Alex Tabarrok

#16. One section of our country believes slavery is right, and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong, and ought not to be extended.

Abraham Lincoln

#17. The tolerance of wrong dulls our sense of its injustice. Men may become accustomed to theft, murder, even to slavery - that sum of all villainies - so they see no injustice in it, yet that which is unjust is unjust still.

Henry George

#18. If the fundamental principles in the Declaration of Independence, as self-evident truths, are real truths, the existence of slavery, in any form, is a wrong.

John Quincy Adams

#19. In the nineteenth century, slavery was the greatest wrong, and government never stood so tall as when it was redressing that wrong.

William Weld

#20. When Judge Douglas says that whoever, or whatever community, wants slaves, they have a right to have them, he is perfectly logical if there is nothing wrong in the institution; but if you admit that it is wrong, he cannot logically say that anybody has a right to do wrong.

Abraham Lincoln

#21. Wrong and injustice to the poor he resented as an injury to God. His vehement love for the poor is illustrated by his "Epistle to Coroticus," reproaching him with his cruelty, as well as by his denunciations of slavery, which piracy had introduced into parts of Ireland.

Aubrey De Vere

#22. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.

Abraham Lincoln

#23. I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: 'If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.' Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.

Christopher Hitchens

#24. Well," said Miss Ophelia, "do you think slavery right or wrong?"
"I'm not going to have any of your horrid New England directness, cousin," said St. Clare, gayly.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

#25. If that form of government, that system of social order is not wrong - if those laws of the Southern States, by virtue of which slavery exists there, and is what it is, are not wrong - nothing is wrong.

Leonard Bacon

#26. It is better to go near the truth and be imprisoned than to stay with the wrong and roam about freely, master Galilei. In fact, getting attached to falsity is terrible slavery, and real freedom is only next to the right.

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#27. To us it seems incredible that the Greek philosophers should have scanned so deeply into right and wrong and yet never noticed the immorality of slavery. Perhaps 3000 years from now it will seem equally incredible that we do not notice the immorality of our own oppression of animals.

Brigid Brophy