Enslaving Quotes - page 2
The justification of slavery is placed, so far as I know, mainly upon these grounds. The inferiority of the enslaved race, the fact that enslaving men imparts Christianity and civilization to them, and thirdly, the guarantees of the Constitution. These are the three main arguments presented to justify slavery, and consequently to justify its expansion, and by the way, I hold that the extreme men, as they are called, on this question, are the only men who have the logic of it. I am right or the fire-eaters or right. If slavery is right in Virginia, it is right in Kansas. If it is wrong in Kansas, it is wrong everywhere.
Owen Lovejoy
The principle of enslaving human beings because they are inferior, is this. If a man is a cripple, trip him up. If he is old and weak, and bowed with the weight of years, strike him, for he cannot strike back. If idiotic, take advantage of him, and if a child, deceive him. This, sir, this is the doctrine of Democrats and the doctrine of devils as well, and there is no place in the universe outside the five points of hell and |the Democratic Party where the practice and prevalence of such doctrines would not be a disgrace.
Owen Lovejoy
Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough: there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling; against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own.
John Stuart Mill