Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it.
Gerrit Smith

Pervading nationalism imposes its dominion on man today in many different forms and with an aggressiveness that spares no one. The challenge that is already with us is the temptation to accept as true freedom what in reality is only a new form of slavery.
Pope John Paul II

Religion can never reform mankind because religion is slavery.
Robert Green Ingersoll

Should slavery be abolished there, (and it is an event, which, from these circumstances, we may reasonably expect to be produced in time) let it be remembered, that the Quakers will have had the merit of its abolition.
Thomas Clarkson

Since the days of slavery, if you were a good singer or dancer, it was your job to perform for the master after dinner.
Spike Lee

Sir, there is no Christian nation, thus free to choose as we are, which would establish slavery.
William H. Seward

Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.
Ernestine L. Rose

Slavery can only be abolished by raising the character of the people who compose the nation; and that can be done only by showing them a higher one.
Maria W. Chapman

Slavery discourages arts and manufactures.
George Mason

Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.
Andrew Johnson

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.
Nina Simone

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.
Edmund Burke

Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freeman with votes in their hands are left without education.
Robert Charles Winthrop

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell

Slavery is no more sinful, by the Christian code, than it is sinful to wear a whole coat, while another is in tatters, to eat a better meal than a neighbor, or otherwise to enjoy ease and plenty, while our fellow creatures are suffering and in want.
James F. Cooper

Slavery is not the only question which comes up in this controversy. There is a far more important one to you, and that is, what shall be done with the free negro?
Stephen Douglas

Slavery is the first step towards civilization. In order to develop it is necessary that things should be much better for some and much worse for others, then those who are better off can develop at the expense of others.
Alexander Herzen

Slavery takes hold of few, but many take hold of slavery.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca

Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.
Mary Wollstonecraft

Slavery was regarded by Aristotle as an ordinance of nature, and so probably was it by the slaves themselves in olden time.
Alfred Marshall