If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

Revolution is but thought carried into action.

We shall soon be obliged to meet in cellars, or in darkened rooms with closed doors, and speak in whispers lest our next door neighbors should hear that freeborn citizens dare not speak in the open.

The pathos of it all is that the America which is to be protected by a huge military force is not the America of the people, but that of the privileged class.

Never can a new idea move within the law. It matters not whether that idea pertains to political and social changes or to any other domain of human thought and expression - to science, literature, music; in fact, everything that makes for freedom and joy and beauty must refuse to move within the law. How can it be otherwise? The law is stationary, fixed, mechanical, 'a chariot wheel' which grinds all alike without regard to time, place and condition, without ever taking into account cause and effect, without ever going into the complexity of the human soul.

If not for the direct action of a John Brown and his comrades, America would still trade in the flesh of the black man.

The government will ... go on in the highly democratic method of conscripting American manhood for European slaughter.