"This is no dispute between Northerners and Southerners; but between conservatives and revolutionionists; between Christians and infidels; between law and order men and no-government men; between the friends of private property and socialists and agrarians; between the chaste and the libidinous; between marriage and free-love; between those who believe in the past, in history, in human experience, in the Bible, in human nature, and those who, like Greeley, and Fourier, and Fanny Wright, and Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine, and Seward, foolishly, rashly, and profanely, attempt to "expel human nature," to bring about a millennium, and inaugurate a future wholly unlike anything that has preceded it."

“No association, no efficient combination of labor can be effected till men give up their liberty of action and subject themselves to a common despotic head or ruler. This is slavery, and towards this socialism is moving.”

“No one will contend that negroes, for instance, should roam at large in puris naturalibus, with the apes and tigers of Africa, and ‘worry and devour each other.’ Nor are they fitted for an Athenian democracy. What form of government short of domestic slavery will suit their wants and capacities?”

“What a glorious thing to man is slavery, when want, misfortune, old age, debility and sickness overtake him.”

“Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form.”

“Liberty of the press, liberty of speech, freedom of religion, or rather freedom from religion, and the unlimited right of private judgement have borne no good fruit, and many bad ones.”

“The failure of laissez-faire, of political economy, is admitted now by its last and lingering votary. Free society stands condemned by the unanimous testimony of all its enlightened members.”