The likeness we bear to Jesus is more essential than our notions of him.

Lucretia Mott (Activist, 1793 – 1880)

I resolved to claim for my sex all that an impartial Creator had bestowed, which, by custom and a perverted application of the Scriptures, had been wrested from woman.

Lucretia Mott (Activist, 1793 – 1880)

The Bible clearly teaches that men and women are equal, but at the same time very uniquely different. Each with their own strengths and weaknesses. Lucretia was fighting a culture at that time that was oppressing women’s rights.

Those who go forth ministering to the wants and necessities of their fellow beings experience a rich return, their souls being as a watered garden, and a spring that faileth not.

Lucretia Mott (Activist, 1793 – 1880)

Let us no longer be blinded by the dim theology that only in the far seeing vision discovers a millennium, when violence shall no more be heard in the land wasting nor destruction in her borders; but let us behold it now, nigh at the door lending faith and confidence to our hopes, assuring us that even we ourselves shall be instrumental in proclaiming liberty to the captive.

Lucretia Mott (Activist, 1793 – 1880)

There is a broad distinction between religion and theology. The one is a natural, human experience common to all well-organized minds. The other is a system of speculations about the unseen and the unknowable, which the human mind has no power to grasp or explain, and these speculations vary with every sect, age, and type of civilization. No one knows any more of what lies beyond our sphere of action than thou and I, and we know nothing.

Lucretia Mott (Activist, 1793 – 1880)

It is time that Christians were judged more by their likeness to Christ than their notions of Christ. Were this sentiment generally admitted we should not see such tenacious adherence to what men deem the opinions and doctrines of Christ while at the same time in every day practise is exhibited anything but a likeness to Christ.

Lucretia Mott (Activist, 1793 – 1880)

It [slavery] has exercised absolute mastery over the American Church. . . . With the Bible in their hands, her priesthood have attempted to prove that slavery came down from God out of heaven. They have become slaveholders and dealers in human flesh.

William Lloyd Garrison (Journalist, 1805 – 1879)

Better to be always in a minority of one with God – branded as madman, incendiary, fanatic, heretic, infidel – frowned upon by “the powers that be,” and mobbed by the populace – or consigned ignominiously to the gallows, like him whose “soul is marching on,” though his “body lies mouldering in the grave,” or burnt to ashes at the stake like Wickliffe, or nailed to the cross like him who “gave himself for the world,” – in defence of the RIGHT, than like Herod, having the shouts of a multitude crying, “It is the voice of a god, and not of a man!”

William Lloyd Garrison (Journalist, 1805 – 1879)

What shall be said, then, of those who insist upon ignoring the question of slavery as not involved in this deadly feud, and maintain that the only issue is, the support of the government and the preservation of the Union? Surely, they are “fools and blind”; for it is slaveholders alone who have conspired to seize the one, and overturn the other. As long as the enslavement of a single human being is sanctioned in the land, the curse of God will rest upon it.

William Lloyd Garrison (Journalist, 1805 – 1879)

My crime is that I will not go with the multitude to do evil. My singularity is that when I say that freedom is of God and slavery is of the devil, I mean just what I say. My fanaticism is that I insist on the American people abolishing slavery, or ceasing to prate on the rights of man.

William Lloyd Garrison (Journalist, 1805 – 1879)