"Strip the proud nobility of their bloated estates, reduce them to a level with plain republicans, send forth to labor, and teach their children to enter the workshops or handle the plow, and you will thus humble proud traitors."
"There can be no fanatics in the cause of genuine liberty. Fanaticism is excessive zeal. There may be, and have been fanatics in false religion; in the bloody religions of the heathen."
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Source: The Selected Papers of Thaddeus Stevens, Volume 1: April 1865-August 1868 by Thaddeus Stevens, University of Pittsburgh Pre, 1997.
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"I don’t hold with equality in all things only with equality before the law and nothing more."
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"I can never acknowledge the right of slavery. I will bow down to no deity however worshipped by professing Christians - however dignified by the name of the Goddess of Liberty, whose footstool is the crushed necks of the groaning millions, and who rejoices in the resoundings of the tyrant's lash, and the cries of his tortured victims."
"I wished that I were the owner of every southern slave, that I might cast off the shackles from their limbs, and witness the rapture which would excite them in the first dance of their freedom."
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