Abolitionists

"Hace más ruído un sólo hombre gritando que cien mil que están callados."

"De lo que mis Granaderos son capaces, solo lo sé yo, quien los iguale habrá, quien los exceda no."

"Solo quiero Leones en mi regimiento."

"Serás lo que debas ser o si no no serás nada."

"Los soldados de la patria no conocen el lujo, sino la gloria."

"Mi mejor amigo es el que enmienda mis errores o reprueba mis desaciertos."

"Mercedes … this is the exhaustion of death. Mariano — back to my room."

"One should be under no illusions as to the future of the Old World. The real contest in the present day is purely social. In a word the struggle lies between him who has nothing and him who has. Figure out the consequences of such a principle, infiltrated in the masses by the harangues of the clubs and the reading of millions of pamphlets."

"He has no hope that never had a fear."

"Outside in the harbor ... was the captain of the slave-ship, with so clear a conscience that one of them, in the intervals of waiting to enrich British capitalism with the profits of another valuable cargo, enriched British religion by composing the hymn "How Sweet the Name of Jesus Sounds!""

"When we've been there ten thousand years, Bright shining as the sun, We've no less days to sing God's praise Than when we'd first begun."

"I look upon prayer-meetings as the most profitable exercises (excepting the public preaching) in which Christians can engage. They have a direct tendency to kill a worldly, trifling spirit, and to draw down a Divine blessing upon all our concerns, compose differences, and enkindle (at least maintain) the flames of Divine love amongst brethren."

"There is many a thing which the world calls disappointment; but there is no such thing in the dictionary of faith. What to others are disappointments are to believers intimations of the will of God."

"Show me what I have to do, Every hour my strength renew; Let me live a life of faith, Let me die Thy people's death."

"The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, The sun forbear to shine; But God, who call'd me here below, Will be forever mine."

"Thro' many dangers, toils and snares, I have already come; 'Tis grace has brought me safe thus far, And grace will lead me home."

"'Twas grace that taught my heart to fear, And grace my fears reliev'd; How precious did that grace appear, The hour I first believ'd!"

"Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) That sav'd a wretch like me! I once was lost, but now am found, Was blind, but now I see."

"Zeal is that pure and heavenly flame, The fire of love supplies; While that which often bears the name, Is self in a disguise. True zeal is merciful and mild, Can pity and forbear; The false is headstrong, fierce and wild, And breathes revenge and war."

"I am not what I ought to be — ah, how imperfect and deficient! I am not what I wish to be — I abhor what is evil, and I would cleave to what is good! I am not what I hope to be — soon, soon shall I put off mortality, and with mortality all sin and imperfection. Yet, though I am not what I ought to be, nor what I wish to be, nor what I hope to be, I can truly say, I am not what I once was; a slave to sin and Satan; and I can heartily join with the apostle, and acknowledge, "By the grace of God I am what I am.""

"By one hour's intimate access to the throne of grace, where the Lord causes his glory to pass before the soul that seeks him, you may acquire more true spiritual knowledge and comfort, than by a day or a week's converse with the best of men, or the most studious perusal of many folios."

"I should be inexcusable, considering the share I have formerly had in that unhappy business, if, upon this occasion, I should omit to mention the African slave-trade. I do not rank this amongst our national sins, because I hope, and believe, a very great majority of the nation earnestly long for its suppression. But, hitherto, petty and partial interest prevail against the voice of justice, humanity and truth. This enormity, however, is not sufficiently laid to heart. If you are justly shocked by what you hear of the cruelties practised in France, you would, perhaps, be shocked much more, if you could fully conceive of the evils and miseries inseparable from this traffic, which I apprehend, not from hearsay, but from my own observation, are equal in atrocity, and, perhaps superior in number, in the course of a single year, to any or all the worst actions which have been known in France since the commencement of their revolution. There is a cry of blood against us; a cry accumulated by the accession of fresh victims, of thousands, of scores of thousands, I had almost said of hundreds of thousands, from year to year."

"Whether men are pleased or not, we will, we must, worship the Lamb that was slain."

"If the trade is at present carried on to the same extent and nearly in the same manner, while we are delaying from year to year to put a stop to our part in it, the blood of many thousands of our helpless, much injured fellow creatures is crying against us. The pitiable state of the survivors who are torn from their relatives, connections, and their native land must be taken into account. I fear the African trade is a national sin, for the enormities which accompany it are now generally known; and though, perhaps, the greater part of the nation would be pleased if it were suppressed, yet, as it does not immediately affect their own interest, they are passive. {...] Can we wonder that the calamities of the present war begin to be felt at home, when we ourselves wilfully and deliberately inflict much greater calamities upon the native Africans, who never offended us?. "Woe unto thee that spoilest, and thou wast not spoiled when thou shalt cease to spoil, thou shalt be spoiled"

"The pathos of some minor poems is unsurpassable. Cowper is attractive whenever he shows his genuine self."

"In the ‘Task,’ his playfulness, his exquisite appreciation of simple natural beauties, and his fine moral perceptions found full expression. Cowper now revealed himself in his natural character. He speaks as the gentle recluse, describes his surroundings playfully and pathetically, and is no longer declaiming from the rostrum or pulpit of the old-fashioned satirist."

"We can not but admire a man who, subject to a lifelong illness that inflicted with frequent recurrence an intense mental agony, fought persistently against his weakness—at times their master, at times a victim to their influence. Still he did not flinch even under this torture, but held his pen and pressed it to write in a cause which was distinctly unpopular. Cowper was preeminently a poet of feelings; he may have been melancholy, but he pointed out to his readers how they were themselves subjects of emotion. He owed a debt to Providence, and he rebuked the people for their follies. In doing so he was regardless of his own fame and of their opprobrium. He gave them tolerable advice, and strove to awaken them from their apathy to a sense of their duty towards their neighbours. First of poets, since the days of Milton, to champion the sacredness of religion, he was the forerunner of a new school that disliked the political satires of the disciples of Pope, and aimed at borrowing for their lines of song from the simple beauties of a perfect nature."

"Have you ever read the letters of the poet Cowper? He had nothing—literally nothing—to tell anyone about; private life in a sleepy country town where Evangelical distrust of "the world" denied him even such miserable society as the place would have afforded. And yet one reads a whole volume of his letters with unfailing interest. How his tooth came loose at dinner, how he made a hutch for a tame hare, what he is doing about his cucumbers—all this he makes one follow as if the fate of empires hung on it."

"Cowper, writing after Pope, had the advantage of knowing what to avoid; but he was misled by a false analogy, and seeing in Milton a great epic poet, austere in his manner and repellent of meretricious ornament, attempted to force on Homer a style which, rightly considered, is almost as artificial as Virgil's, and which, moreover, he was himself unequal to wield."

"The mind of Cowper was, so to speak, naturally terrestrial. If a man wishes for a nice appreciation of the details of time and sense, let him consult Cowper's miscellaneous letters. Each simple event of every day—each petty object of external observation or inward suggestion, is there chronicled with a fine and female fondness, a wise and happy faculty, let us say, of deriving a gentle happiness from the tranquil and passing hour."

"The innocent seldom find an uncomfortable pillow."

"No man can be a patriot on an empty stomach."

"Ever let the Fancy roam, Pleasure never is at home."

"But strive still to be a man before your mother."

"For 'tis a truth well known to most, That whatsoever thing is lost, We seek it, ere it come to light, In every cranny but the right."

"The path of sorrow, and that path alone, Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown."

"And the tear that is wiped with a little address, May be follow'd perhaps by a smile."

"A kick that scarce would move a horse May kill a sound divine."

"He sees that this great roundabout The world, with all its motley rout, Church, army, physic, law, Its customs and its businesses, Is no concern at all of his, And says—what says he?—Caw."

"There is a bird who by his coat, And by the hoarseness of his note, Might be supposed a crow."

"He that holds fast the golden mean, And lives contentedly between The little and the great, Feels not the wants that pinch the poor, Nor plagues that haunt the rich man's door."

"My soul Shall bear that also; for, by practice taught, I have learned patience, having much endured."

"As when around the clear bright moon, the stars Shine in full splendor, and the winds are hush'd, The groves, the mountain-tops, the headland-heights Stand all apparent, not a vapor streaks The boundless blue, but ether open'd wide All glitters, and the shepherd's heart is cheer'd."

"I will venture to assert, that a just translation of any ancient poet in rhyme is impossible. No human ingenuity can be equal to the task of closing every couplet with sounds homotonous, expressing at the same time the full sense, and only the full sense of his original."

"So Fancy dreams. Disprove it, if ye can, Ye reasoners broad awake, whose busy search Of argument, employed too oft amiss, Sifts half the pleasures of short life away!"

"Thou wast a bauble once; a cup and ball, Which babes might play with; and the thievish jay Seeking her food, with ease might have purloined The auburn nut that held thee, swallowing down Thy yet close-folded latitude of boughs And all thine embryo vastness at a gulp. But fate thy growth decreed."

"It seems idolatry with some excuse, When our forefather Druids in their oaks Imagined sanctity."

"Survivor sole, and hardly such, of all that once lived here"

"Prove that you have human feelings, Ere you proudly question ours!"

"Deem our nation brutes no longer, Till some reason ye shall find Worthier of regard and stronger Than the colour of our kind."