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We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for independence - and that, or extermination, we will have.

— Jefferson Davis

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Slavery

More quotes by Jefferson Davis

If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.

We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude.

Tradition usually rests upon something which men did know; history is often the manufacture of the mere liar.

Are we, in this age of civilization and political progress... to roll back the whole current of human thought, and again return to the mere brute force which prevails between beasts of prey, as the only method of settling questions between men?

Speech (1861)

...How idle is this prating about natural rights as though still containing all that had been forfeited.

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We spend our lives fighting to get people very slightly more stupid than ourselves to accept truths that the great men have always known.

Doris Lessing The Golden Notebook (1962)

What constitutes the bulwark of our own liberty and independence?

Abraham Lincoln

The worker is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave of that slave.

James Connolly

The Autocrat of all the Russias will resign his crown, and proclaim his subjects free republicans sooner than will our American masters voluntarily give up their slaves.

Abraham Lincoln

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Jefferson Davis (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.