Thomas Clarkson Quotes

It is time," said the Lord Pilot, "to see this calamity to its end." Spoken in Archaic English: the words uttered by Thomas Clarkson in 1785, at the beginning of the end of slavery. "I have set my will against this disaster; I will break it, or it will break me." Ira Howard in 2014. "I will not share my universe with this shadow," and that was the Lord Pilot, in an anger hotter than the nova's ashes. "Help me if you will, or step aside if you lack decisiveness; but do not make yourself my obstacle, or I will burn you down, and any that stand with you -

I think all young women should read Anne. But that’s just the beginning. I think pretty much every woman should go on to read Jane Austen and George Eliot, Marilynne Robinson and Wendell Berry, Thomas Merton and C. S. Lewis, because these authors really do help us to understand what it means to be a woman of life and grace.

Coming in sight of Wades Mill in Hertfordshire, I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end." Some person should see these calamities to their end. If there is a single moment at which the antislavery movement became inevitable, it was the day in June 1785 when Thomas Clarkson sat down by the side of the road at Wades Mill.

In the nineteenth century, Thomas Clarkson wrote of the abolition movement: “The greatest works must have a beginning. . . . However small the beginning and slow the progress may appear in any good work which we may undertake, we need not be discouraged as to the ultimate result of our labours.