G

• A man in love is incomplete until he is married. Then he is finished.

• Idealism increases in direct proportion to one's distance from the problem.

• Trade links all mankind in one common brotherhood of mutual dependence and interests.

• If the State cannot survive the antislavery agitation, then let the State perish. If the Church must be cast down by the strugglings of Humanity to be free, then let the Church fall, and its fragments be scattered to the four winds of heaven, never more to curse the earth. If the American Union cannot be maintained, except by immolating human freedom on the altar of tyranny, then let the American Union be consumed by a living thunderbolt, and no tear shed over its ashes. If the Republic must be blotted out from the roll of nations, by proclaiming liberty to the captives, then let the Republic sink beneath the waves of oblivion, and a shout of joy, louder than the voice of many waters, fill the universe at its extinction.
• There must be no compromise with slavery--none whatever. Nothing is gained, everything is lost, by subordinating principle to expediency.
• To ask for postponement of the case, till a more convenient season, is to call for a suspension of the moral law, and to assume that it is right to do wrong, under present circumstances.
• Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.
• With reasonable men, I will reason; with humane men, I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter, nor waste arguments where they will certainly be lost.
• No Union with slaveholders!

• Wars are precipitated by motives which the statesmen responsible for them dare not publicly avow. A public discussion would drag these motives in their nudity into the open, where they would die of exposure to the withering contempt of humanity.

• The right of every human being to himself is the foundation of the right of property.

• Reform must come from within, not from without. You cannot legislate for virtue.

• Naturally the common people don't want war ... but after all it is the leaders of a country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament or a communist dictatorship. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

• There is nothing more odious than the majority. It consists of a few powerful men who lead the way; of accommodating rascals and submissive weaklings; and a mass of men who trot after them without in the least knowing their own minds.

• It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom. It is the accumulated indignation against organized wrong, organized crime, organized injustice, which drives the political offender to act.
• I for one will speak against war so long as my voice will last, now and during the war. A thousand times rather would I die calling to the people of America to refuse to be obedient ... than I should ever give my voice in justification of war, except the one war of all the peoples against their despots and exploiters--the Social Revolution.

• The united voice of millions cannot lend the smallest foundation to falsehood.

• I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice. And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.
• A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.
• The income tax created more criminals than any other single act of government.

• Anyone who goes to a psychiatrist should have his head examined.

• A zebra cannot change its spots.

• For two thousand years Christianity has been telling us: life is death, death is life; it is high time to consult the dictionary.

• A penny will hide the biggest star in the universe if you hold it close enough to your eye.

• Neither antiquity nor any other sect of the present day has imagined a more atrocious and blasphemous absurdity than that of eating God. It is a most revolting dogma, insulting to the Supreme Being, the height of madness and folly.

• The great fundamental principle of Abolitionists is, that man cannot rightfully hold his fellow man as property. Therefore, we affirm, that every slaveholder is a man-stealer. ... It matters not whether this be done in Guinea, or Carolina; a man is a man, and as a man he has inalienable rights, among which is the right to personal liberty.
• The only difference I can see between the original man-stealer, who caught the African in his native country, and the American slaveholder, is, that the former committed one act of robbery, while the other perpetuates the same crime continually. Slaveholding is the perpetrating of acts, all of the same kind, in a series, the first of which is technically called man-stealing. The first act robbed the man of himself; and the same state of mind that prompted that act, keeps up the series, having taken his all from him; it keeps his all from him, not only refusing to restore, but still robbing him of all he gets, and as fast as he gets it. Slaveholding, then, is the constant or habitual perpetration of the act of man-stealing.

• It's a game. We [tax lawyers] teach the rich how to play it so they can stay rich--and the IRS keeps changing the rules so we can keep getting rich teaching them.

• Our government employs thousands of bureaucrats to track down and break up monopolies on the grounds that monopolies stifle competition and thereby produce bad products at high prices. Doesn’t it strike anyone strange that the same government protects its own monopoly in education? And stranger still, that nearly everyone accepts this state of affairs as normal--as something that has always been and must always be?

• The woman who does not marry makes a blunder that can only be compared to that of the man who does.

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