Abolitionist Quotes

1. "I'm a prison abolitionist because the prison system as it is set up is just not working. It's horrible."
Author: Ava DuVernay

2. "It was a creed written into the founding documents that declared the destiny of a nation.Yes we can.It was whispered by slaves and abolitionists as they blazed a trail toward freedom through the darkest of nights.Yes we can.It was sung by immigrants as they struck out from distant shores and pioneers who pushed westward against an unforgiving wilderness.Yes we can.It was the call of workers who organized; women who reached for the ballot; a President who chose the moon as our new frontier; and a King who took us to the mountaintop and pointed the way to the Promised Land.Yes we can to justice and equality. Yes we can to opportunity and prosperity. Yes we can heal this nation. Yes we can repair this world. Yes we can"
Author: Barack Obama

3. "One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists."
Author: Carter G. Woodson

4. "…in recent history the Democrat Party has created the illusion that their agenda and their policies are what's best for black people. Somehow it's been forgotten that the Republican Party was founded in 1854 as an abolitionist movement with one simple creed: that slavery is a violation of the rights of man."
Author: Elbert Guillory

5. "Taking an abolitionist stance does not mean refusing to engage in incremental change, nor does it mean abandoning efforts to improve conditions inside prisons. Rather, abolitionists engage in 'abolitionist reforms' or 'non-reformist reforms.' These are reforms that either directly undermine the prison industrial complex or provide support to prisoners through strategies that weaken, rather than strengthen, the prison system itself. For example, rather than lobbying for bigger prison health budgets to care for elderly prisoners, an abolitionist reform strategy would aim to get elderly prisoners out on compassionate release to obtain healthcare in the community. --S. Lamble"
Author: Eric A. Stanley

6. "There is a large body of abolitionists in Clinton and Clark Counties in this state, and in Wayne County Indiana, that would undoubtedly support such a store, but whether their support would be sufficient, I am unable to say."
Author: Gamaliel Bailey

7. "An abolitionist is, as I have developed that notion, one who (1) maintains that we cannot justify animal use, however "humane" it may be; (2) rejects welfare campaigns that seek more "humane" exploitation, or single-issue campaigns that seek to portray one form of animal exploitation as morally worse than other forms of animal exploitation (e.g., a campaign that seeks to distinguish fur from wool or leather); and (3) regards veganism, or the complete rejection of the consumption or use of any animal products, as a moral baseline. An abolitionist regards creative, nonviolent vegan education as the primary form of activism, because she understands that the paradigm will not shift until we address demand and educate people to stop thinking of animals as things we eat, wear, or use as our resources."
Author: Gary L. Francione

8. "One of the main arguments that I make is that although almost everyone accepts that it is morally wrong to inflict "unnecessary" suffering and death on animals, 99% of the suffering and death that we inflict on animals can be justified only by our pleasure, amusement, or convenience. For example, the best justification that we have for killing the billions of nonhumans that we eat every year is that we enjoy the taste of animal flesh and animal products. This is not an acceptable justification if we take seriously, as we purport to, that it is wrong to inflict unnecessary suffering or death on animals, and it illustrates the confused thinking that I characterize as our "moral schizophrenia" when it comes to nonhumans.A follow-up question that I often get is: "What about vivisection? Surely that use of animals is not merely for our pleasure, is it?"Vivisection, Part One: The "Necessity" of Vivisection | Animal Rights: The Abolitionist Approach http://bit.ly/ol179F"
Author: Gary L. Francione

9. "Abolitionist"
Author: Harriet Beecher Stowe

10. "As the war went on, opposition grew. The American Peace Society printed a newspaper, the Advocate of Peace, which published poems, speeches, petitions, sermons against the war, and eyewitness accounts of the degradation of army life and the horrors of battle. The abolitionists, speaking through William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, denounced the war as one "of aggression, of invasion, of conquest, and rapine—marked by ruffianism, perfidy, and every other feature of national depravity . . . " Considering the strenuous efforts of the nation's leaders to build patriotic support, the amount of open dissent and criticism was remarkable. Antiwar meetings took place in spite of attacks by patriotic mobs."
Author: Howard Zinn

11. "What created democracy was Thomas Paine and Shays' Rebellion, the suffragists and the abolitionists and on down through the populists and the labor movement, including the Wobblies. Tough, in your face people... Mother Jones, Woody Guthrie... Martin Luther King and Caesar Chavez. And now it's down to us."
Author: Jim Hightower

12. "In such a condition of affairs, the practical difference between the abolitionist and the sympathizer, to the man who lost his slave and could not recover it, was very nebulous."
Author: John Sergeant Wise

13. "What if I can't save Congo, but I try anyway? Would it be better to do nothing? Did he abolitionists really think they could end slavery? Did the anit-apartheid movement really think it could ban apartheid? Does Save Darfur really think they can save Darfur?"
Author: Lisa Shannon

14. "There were thousands of abolitionists who were free traders."
Author: Robert Toombs

15. "It has come as a great revelation to me that abolitionist is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition."
Author: Sue Monk Kidd

16. "Older forms of indentured servanthood and the bond-service of biblical times had often been harsh, but Christian abolitionists concluded that race-based, life-long chattel slavery, established through kidnapping, could not be squared with biblical teaching either in the Old Testament or the New."
Author: Timothy Keller

Abolitionist Quotes Pictures