dice of some individual,—to the producing on the part of such individual some suffering, to which (whether as forbidden by the law or otherwise) we conceive he ought not to have been subjected."—Bentham.
"Belief always bears the impress of character,—is, in fact, its product. Anthropomorphism sufficiently proves this. Men's wishes eventually get expressed in their faiths,—their real faiths that is; not their nominal ones. Pull to pieces a man's theory of things, and you will find it based upon facts collected upon the suggestion of his desires. A fiery passion consumes all evidences opposed to its gratification, and fusing together those that serve its purpose, casts them into weapons by which to achieve its end. Perhaps the slave-owner's assertion that negroes are not human beings, and the kindred dogma of the Mahometans, that women have no souls, are the strangest samples of convictions so formed."—Spencer.
"I possess dignity and power, which ignorance and credulity have founded. I trample on the heads of men prostrated at my feet; if they should rise and look me in the face, I am lost; they must, therefore, be kept bound down to the earth with chains of iron."—Voltaire.
"Shall the prejudices and paralysis of slavery continue to hang upon the skirts of progress? How long will those who rejoice that slavery no longer exists cherish or tolerate the incapacities it put upon their communities?"—President Harrison.
"Surely there is some tender chord, tuned by the hand of its Creator, that struggles to emit in the hearing of the soul a note of sorrowing sympathy."—Paine.
"It is the nation in its organic and moral unity, which acts as a power in history, and not a race in its special and separate physical character. The fact in correspondence with this has always been, that the nation has been rent and broken in its strength and swept from the foundation on which it alone can subsist, when it has assumed to identify itself exclusively with a race or to build upon the distinction of races. It has no longer a moral foundation nor a universal end when it asserts as its ground the rights of a race, and not the rights of a man; and the government which no longer recognizes justice as necessary, nor subsists in the sovereignty and freedom of the people in a moral organism, but is in identity with a race, is the sign of an expiring civilization."—Mulford.
"I know it is said that it is impossible to civilize Africa. Why? Why is it impossible to civilize man in one part of the earth more than in another? Consult history. Was Italy—was Greece—the cradle of civilization? No. As far back as the lights of tradition reach, Africa was the cradle of science, while Syria and Greece and Italy were yet covered
