Quotes from William Lloyd Garrison

The success of any great moral enterprise does not depend upon numbers.

My country is the world; my countrymen are mankind.

The Sabbath, as now recognized and enforced, is one of the main pillars of Priestcraft and Superstition, and the stronghold of a merely ceremonial Religion.

Prayer is omnipotent: its breath can melt adamantine rocks - its touch can break the stoutest chains.

We may be personally defeated, but our principles never!

Let not those who say that the path of obedience is a dangerous one claim to believe in the living and true God. They deny his omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence. It is his will that the bands of wickedness should be loosed, the heavy burdens of tyranny undone, the oppressed set free.

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.

Let anti-slavery charity boxes stand uppermost among those for missionary, tract and educational purposes. On this subject, Christians have been asleep; let them shake off their slumbers and arm for the holy contest.

Enslave the liberty of but one human being and the liberties of the world are put in peril.

If the State cannot survive the anti-slavery 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.

Whether permitted to live to witness the abolition of slavery or not, I felt assured that, as I demanded nothing that was not clearly in accordance with justice and humanity, some time or other, if remembered at all, I should stand vindicated in the eyes of my countrymen.

I am accused of using hard language. I admit the charge. I have not been able to find a soft word to describe villainy or to identify the perpetrator of it. The man who makes a chattel of his brother - what is he? The man who keeps back the hire of his laborers by fraud - what is he?

We are the friends of reform; but that is not reform, which, in curing one evil, threatens to inflict a thousand others.

I do not believe that God has created us under this dire necessity to toil, like beasts, to sustain life. I believe it is his will that we should hold absolute mastery over time, so as to devote it mainly to intellectual and moral improvement, domestic enjoyment, and social intercourse.

I will be as harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice... I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not excuse, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard.

Are right and wrong convertible terms, dependant upon popular opinion?

If nations perish, it is not because of their devotion to liberty, but for their disregard of its requirements.

Every Fourth of July, our Declaration of Independence is produced, with a sublime indignation, to set forth the tyranny of the mother country and to challenge the admiration of the world. But what a pitiful detail of grievances does this document present in comparison with the wrongs which our slaves endure!

I am in earnest; I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch; and I will be heard.

In firing his gun, John Brown has merely told what time of day it is. It is high noon.

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell.

I am in earnest - I will not equivocate - I will not excuse - I will not retreat a single inch and I will be beard.

Wherever there is a human being, I see God-given rights inherent in that being, whatever may be the sex or complexion.

The compact which exists between the North and the South is a covenant with death and an agreement with hell; involving both parties in atrocious criminality and should be immediately annulled.