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I have always thought that all men should be free; but if any should be slaves, it should be first those who desire it for themselves, and secondly, those who desire it for others. When I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.

— Abraham Lincoln

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Slavery

More quotes by Abraham Lincoln

Without the military help of the black freedman, the war against the South could not have been won.

Slavery is founded in the selfishness of man's nature — opposition to it, in his love of justice.

Speech at Peoria, Illinois (1854)

Beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.

We live in the midst of alarms; anxiety beclouds the future; we expect some new disaster with each newspaper we read.

Determine that the thing can and shall be done, and then we shall find the way.

All Abraham Lincoln quotes →

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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)

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

James Connolly

Every measure of prudence, therefore, ought to be assumed for the eventual total extirpation of slavery from the United States.

John Adams Letter to Robert J. Evans (1819)

Partial freedom seems to me the most invidious form of slavery.

Edmund Burke Is the Party Over? (2017)

Attribution

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