Fugitive Slave Act

Famous quotes containing the words fugitive slave, fugitive, slave and/or act:

    Is this what all these soldiers, all this training, have been for these seventy-nine years past? Have they been trained merely to rob Mexico and carry back fugitive slaves to their masters?
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.
    Ernest Lehman (b.1920)

    It’s not the suffering of birth, death, love that the young reject, but the suffering of endless labor without dream, eating the spare bread in bitterness, being a slave without the security of a slave.
    Meridel Le Sueur (b. 1900)

    And this must be the prime of life . . . I blink,
    As if at pain; for it is pain, to think
    This pantomime
    Of compensating act and counter-act,
    Defeat and counterfeit, makes up, in fact,
    My ablest time.
    Philip Larkin (1922–1986)