Social Activist
William Lloyd Garrison
"I am for a religion which emancipates man from all bondage, both within and without. I am for a religion which holds to the sanctity of marriage throughout the world. I am for giving the Bible to every human being on the face of the earth, to be made use of as far as possible, to promote his own highest and everlasting interests. I am for a church which has no stain of blood upon its garments. I am for a Christ whose every testimony is to the value of man to a child of God, and whose mission it is to destroy all the works of the devil, to emancipate those who are in bondage, and to set every captive free. I understand this to be the religion of the Anti-Slavery enterprise, and the religion of this Convention ; but a religion unfashionable, proscribed and outlawed even to this day, while that which is falsely called the Christian religion bears sway every where, and the consequence of that sway is the enslavement of every seventh person in our land, to be owned, and bought, and sold, and treated as a beast of burden! Let that religion be accursed, and the religion of freedom prevail!"
Theodore S. Wright
"Thanks be to God, there is a buoyant principle which elevates the poor down-trodden colored man above all this:—It is that there is society which regards man according to his worth; it is the fact, that when he looks up to Heaven he knows that God treats him like a moral agent, irrespective of caste or the circumstances in which he may be placed. Amid the embarrassments which he has to meet, and the scorn and contempt that is heaped upon him, he is cheered by the hope that he will be disenthralled, and soon, like a bird set forth from its cage, wing his flight to Jesus, where he can be happy, and look down with pity on the man who despises the poor slave for being what God made him, and who despises him because he is identified with the poor slave. Blessed be God for the principles of the Gospel. Were it not for these, and for the fact that a better day is dawning, I would not wish to live.—Blessed be God for the antislavery movement. Blessed be God there is a war waging with slavery, that the granite rock is about to be rolled from its base. But as long as the colored man is to be looked upon as an inferior caste, so long will they disregard his cries, his groans, his shrieks."
George Williams
"Prayer and faith have won victories in the past fifty years but these may'be, -will be -as nothing to what shall yet be wrought through the power of Christ resting upon you.
I sincerely pray that you may each be fitted with the Holy Spirit. Let it be the aim of each to be able to say, 'I can do all things through Christ, who strengthens me.'"
Lyman Beecher
"Intemperance is the sin of our land, and, with our boundless prosperity, is coming in upon us like a flood; and if anything shall defeat the hopes of the world, which hang upon our experiment of civil liberty, it is that river of fire, which is rolling through the land, destroying the vital air, and extending around an atmosphere of death."
Frederick Douglass
"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land."
Angelina Grimké
“We are all bound to act, to speak, to write against the wrongs of the world, for it is our duty to do so.”
Phoebe Palmer
"God's time is now. The question is not, ‘What have I been?’ or ‘What do I expect to be?’ but, ‘Am I now trusting in Jesus to save to the uttermost?’ If so, I am now saved from all sin.
Ivan Illich
"The machine-like behaviour of people chained to electronics constitutes a degradation of their well-being and of their dignity which, for most people in the long run, becomes intolerable. Observations of the sickening effect of programmed environments show that people in them become indolent, impotent, narcissistic and apolitical. The political process breaks down, because people cease to be able to govern themselves; they demand to be managed."
Dorothy Day
"The mystery of the poor is this: That they are Jesus, and what you do for them you do for Him. It is the only way we have of knowing and believing in our love. The mystery of poverty is that by sharing in it, making ourselves poor in giving to others, we increase our knowledge of and belief in love."