Luís Gama

"The day of happiness will be the memorable day of the emancipation of the people, and the day of emancipation will be the one when the great are put down and the small raised up; when there are neither masters nor slaves; bosses nor subordinates; powerful nor weak; oppressors nor oppressed; but when the vast Brazil is called the common homeland of Brazilian citizens or United States of Brazil."

"If someday (...) the respectable judges of Brazil, forgetful of the respect they owe the law, and of the indispensable duties they have contracted before morality and the nation, corrupted by venality or the deleterious action of power, abandoning the sacrosanct cause of law (...) failing in due justice to the unfortunate ones who suffer unjust slavery, I, on my own account, (...) and under my sole responsibility, will advise and promote, not insurrection, which is a crime, but "resistance", which is a civic virtue."

"I am not a legal scholar, I am not a doctor, I am not a law graduate, I have no pretensions to celebrity, nor am I in the position to occupy a position in the judiciary; I am, however, disgusted by the notorious incongruity of which, with undauntled arrogance, eminent magistrates who have as their office the study of laws, and as their obligation the just application of them."

"Slavery is a kind of social leprosy: it has often been abolished by legislators and restored by education under various aspects."

"I am an abolitionist, without reservation; I am a citizen; I believe I have done my duty."

"There are scenes of such greatness, or of such misery, that being complete in their kind, they cannot be described; the world and the atom define themselves; thus, crime and virtue keep the same proportion; thus, the slave who kills the master, who fulfills an inevitable prescription of natural right, and the unworthy people, who murder heroes, will never be mixed."

"Wretched people; they ignore that it is more glorious to die free on a rope, or torn to pieces by dogs in the public square, than to feast with the Neros in slavery."

"A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state."

"In front of them Washington, pensive like Archimedes, with the tip of the sacred sword, soaked in the blood of battles, inscribes the United States on the map of the Nations; and Franklin, the modern Teramenes, snatching a ray from the sun, with lucid stars, engraves in infinity the eternal legend of Liberty."

"At half past one o'clock, as today, 90 years ago, expired the man who, in this country, first proposed the liberation of the slaves, and the proclamation of the Republic. He was tried as a defendant of lese-majestie, he was killed, but Tiradentes dead, like the sun at sunset, shows himself to the universe as great as at its dawn."

"Under the law, the crime of murder perpetrated by the slave on the person of the master is justifiable"

"The slave who kills his master, in any circumstance, always does so in self-defense."

"Luiz Gama is the only intellectual, the only black Brazilian personality of the 19th century to have lived the experience of slavery. This is already a fact that makes him unique in the panorama of Brazil in the 19th century"."

"...Luiz Gama was keen to demonstrate, through his example, the fallacy of the pseudoscientific beliefs in vogue in a slaveholding society convinced of the intellectual incapacity and moral inferiority of Africans and their descendants, the basis of the racist ideology that still persists among us.”"

"One hundred years before Martin Luther King, he said he had a sublime dream: the lands of the Cruzeiro, without kings and without slaves."