“How just, how suitable to our crime is the punishment with which Providence threatens us? We have enslaved multitudes, and shed much innocent blood in doing it; and now are threatened with the same. And while other evils are confessed, and bewailed, why not this especially, and publicly; than which no other vice, if all others, has brought so much guilt on the land?”

— Thomas Paine

1770s, African Slavery in America (March 1775)

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Thomas Paine 262

English and American political activist 1737–1809

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