Elijah Parish Lovejoy

I most earnestly advise you, again and again, love, honor, and obey your parents. Friends like them, you need not expect to find in this world. ”

As the Bible inculcates upon man but one duty in respect to sin, and that is immediate repentance, abolitionists believe that all who hold slaves, or who approve the practice in others, should immediately cease to do so. ”

If I have been guilty of no violation of law, why am I hunted up and down continually like a partridge upon the mountains? Why am I threatened with the tar barrel? Why am I waylaid every day, and from night to night, and my life in jeopardy every hour? ”

I cannot surrender my principles, though the whole world besides should vote them down - I can make no compromise between truth and error, even though my life be the alternative. ”

If the civil authorities refuse to protect me, I must look to God, and if I die, I have determined to make my grave in Alton. ”

Nothing but a miracle of sovereign mercy could have arrested and saved me from eternal perdition. How I could have so long resisted the entreaties, the prayers, and the tears of my dear parents, and the influences of the Holy Spirit, is, to me, a wonder entirely incomprehensible. ”

It seems to me scarcely possible that one who has so long lived in sin, who has resisted so much light and has so often grieved away the Holy Spirit, as I have, should again be visited with its heavenly influences. But I hope it is so. ”

The cry of the oppressed has entered not only into my ears, but into my soul, so that while I live, I cannot hold my peace. ”

The eternal God - the infinite Jehovah - has done all he could do - even to the sacrificing his own Son - to provide a way for man's happiness, and yet they reject him, hate him, and laugh him to scorn! ”

I have been beset night and day at Alton. And now, if I leave here and go elsewhere, violence may overtake me in my retreat, and I have no more claim upon the protection of any other community than I have upon this. ”