Emancipation Quotes - page 8
![[A]sk the slaves themselves how they were freed, and they will say, "Lincoln's proclamation.” The testimony of freed people before the joint committee on reconstruction-about how they became free is uniform. They were well aware that the Fugitive Slave Laws and Constitutional provisions for the rendition of slaves were still in force. The position of runaways remained perilous. The Emancipation Proclamation resolved that. (Allen C. Guelzo)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/29/allen-c-guelzo-committee-522829.webp)
Union (and the liberal democracy it represented) and emancipation were not, after all, mutually exclusive goals. Unless the Union was restored, there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln's best antislavery intensinos.
Allen C. Guelzo
The modern world inherits the Christian view in which salvation is played out in history. In Christian myth human events follow a design known only to God; the history of humankind is an ongoing story of redemption. This is an idea that informs virtually all of western thought – not least when it is intensely hostile to religion. From Christianity onwards, human salvation would be understood (at least in the west) as involving movement through time. All modern philosophies in which history is seen as a process of human emancipation – whether through revolutionary change or incremental improvement – are garbled versions of this Christian narrative, itself a garbled version of the original message of Jesus.
John N. Gray
The most pitiless warriors against drugs have always been militant progressives. In China, the most savage attack on drug use occurred when the country was convulsed by a modern western doctrine of universal emancipation - Maoism. It is no accident that the crusade against drugs is led today by a country wedded to the pursuit of happiness - the United States. For the corollary of that improbable quest is a puritan war on pleasure.
John N. Gray
Thus the period we are studying is remarkable for achieving, not merely the right of free alienation of land, but also the right of alienation by secret conveyance. The latter achievement we may sometimes regret; but it was, probably, necessary for the complete emancipation of land from its its ancient tribal and feudal bonds.
Edward Jenks
In the conflict of ideologies the Hindus have made their position perfectly clear. We hate Nazism and Fascism. We are the enemies of Hitler and Mussolini. We are longing and struggling for our own emancipation and we want to repel any dictator who would try to reduce sections of humanity to slavery to serve the whims of his own megalomania.
Nirmal Chandra Chatterjee
General Sherman, who had lived in the South, liked Southerners and did not at all sympathize with Northern racial views, yet became the most hated and feared destroyer of the South and its whole civilization. And I think he did so because he saw that as necessary to win the war. And I think Lincoln made some of his decisions-issuing the Emancipation Proclamation, for example, or turning Sherman loose - because he saw that as necessary to win the war.
James M. McPherson
Right now I'm thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery. Another was emancipation. It's a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy-and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy. Turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then, in 1877, for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it.
Shelby Foote
Lincoln achieved immortality because he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. His hesitation had not stayed his hand when historic necessity charted but one course. No President can be great, or even fit for office, if he attempts to accommodate to injustice to maintain his political balance.
Martin Luther King Jr.
If our nation had done nothing more in its whole history than to create just two documents, its contribution to civilization would be imperishable. The first of these documents is the Declaration of Independence and the other is that which we are here to honor tonight, the Emancipation Proclamation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Knowledge is a collection of facts. Wisdom is the use of knowledge. Without facts there is no knowledge. Without knowledge there is no wisdom. Facts prevent what nothing can cure. Facts are Man's best defense mechanism. Without them men fumble, falter and fail. Without them nations decline and fall. Wisdom wins wars before they start. Knowledge aborts national hostilities. Wisdom obviates racial antipathies. Knowledge effaces religious animosities. Emancipation from bigotry prefaces peace. Intolerance takes all and gives nothing. Peace rewards reciprocal respect and regard. To all Men of Good Will, "Pax Vobiscum!"
Benjamin H. Freedman
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time. An organization of society [such as communism] which would abolish the preconditions for huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering, would make [this] Jew impossible. His religious consciousness would be dissipated like a thin haze in the real, vital air of society. On the other hand, if the Jew recognizes that this practical nature of his is futile and works to abolish it, he extricates himself from his previous development and works for human emancipation as such and turns against the supreme practical expression of human self-estrangement.
Karl Marx
I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind. It is not against experience to suppose, that different species of the same genus, or varieties of the same species, may posses different qualifications. Will not a lover of natural history then, one who views the gradations in all the races of animals with the eye of philosophy, excuse an effort to keep those in the department of man as distinct as nature has formed them? This unfortunate difference of colour, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.
Thomas Jefferson
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them. It is still in our power to direct the process of emancipation and deportation peaceably and in such slow degree as that the evil will wear off insensibly, and their place be pari passu filled up by free white laborers. If on the contrary it is left to force itself on, human nature must shudder at the prospect held up.
Thomas Jefferson
Many years before Harry Truman fired General Douglas MacArthur, there was another prima donna general, the renowned John C. Frémont. For issuing orders authorizing the emancipation of slaves in Missouri without presidential permission, Lincoln fired him on the spot. As for MacArthur, he should have known better: the same thing had also happened to his own father. Back in the early 1900s, General Arthur MacArthur, military governor of the Philippines, made the stupid mistake of not recognizing the superior authority of the civilian governor, William Howard Taft, who later became president. Years later, when MacArthur's turn came to be promoted to Army Chief of Staff, Taft blackballed him.
Douglas MacArthur
But today, more than 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, more than 50 years after the end of 'separate but equal', when it comes to getting an education, too many of our young people just can't be bothered. Today, instead of walking miles every day to school, they're sitting on couches for hours playing video games, watching T.V. Instead of dreaming of being a teacher or a lawyer or a business leader, they're fantasizing about being a baller or a rapper. Right now, one in three African American students are dropping out of high school. Only one in five African Americans between the ages of 25 and 29 has gotten a college degree; one in five.
Michelle Obama
