nivance or in a corner, the reason mounts the judgment-seat in lieu of passion or interest, and opinion becomes law, instead of arbitrary will; and farewell, feudal lord and sovereign king."—Hazlitt.
"We stand in a region of conjectures, where substance has melted into shadow, and one cannot be distinguished from the other."—Carlyle.
"Hear else what Cicero says in his Fourth Philippic: 'What cause of war can be more just and warrantable than to avoid slavery? For though a people may have the good fortune to live under a gentle master, yet those are in miserable condition whose prince may tyrannize over them if he will.'"—Milton.
"There seems to be something in the institution of slavery which has at all times either shocked or perplexed mankind, however little habituated to reflection, and however slightly advanced in the cultivation of its moral instincts."—Maine.
"In all governments, there is a perpetual intestine struggle, open or secret, between authority and liberty."—Hume.
"Everything that sets in motion the springs of the human heart engaged them to the protection of their inestimable privileges."—Patrick Henry.
"Sell all and purchase liberty."—Id.
"And can we imagine that the whole body of the people of a free nation, though oppressed and tyrannized over and preyed upon, should be left remediless?"—Milton.
"Struggling, struggling like a mighty tree, again about to burst in the embrace of summer, and shoot forth frondose boughs which would fill the whole earth. A disease, but the noblest of all,—as of her who is in pain and sore travail, but travail that she may be a mother, and say, Behold, there is a new man born!"—Carlyle.
"They might foresee a struggle, the last convulsive efforts of pride and power to keep the world in its wonted subjection; but that was nothing; their final triumph over all opposition was assured in the eternal principles of justice, and in their own unshaken devotedness to the great cause of mankind! If the result did not altogether correspond to the intentions of those firm and enlightened patriots who so nobly planned it, the fault was not in them but in others."—Hazlitt.
