Harriet Jacobs Quotes

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.

DURING the first years of my service in Dr. Flint's family, I was accustomed to share some indulgences with the children of my mistress.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

Slavery is the rule. Freedom the exception.

I think he was explicit that it was a slave labor situation, but I was not alarmed at that point, because there were so many tragedies involved in that war. That was the first time I had any indication that something was sort of strange.

Slavery, properly so called, is the establishment of a right which gives to one man such a power over another as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune.

People can be slave-ships in shoes.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

At 17, the first time I saw a dead body, I froze. By 31 it was a natural occurrence for me, and no group of people should live like that.

Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

Many of the former Slaves are only nominally free, for the servile spirit is still within them.

The biographies of slaves can hardly be individualized; they belong to the class. We know bare facts; it is only the general experience of human beings in like condition which can clothe them with life. The outlines are certain, the details are inferential.

If you will have a person enslaved, the first thing you must do is convince yourself that the person is subhuman. The second thing you have to do is convince your allies so you'll have some help, and the third and probably unkindest cut of all is to convince that person that he or she is subhuman and deserves it.

I am a firm believer in slavery.

Since the commencement of 1830, I had been living with Mr. Joseph Travis, who was to me a kind master and placed the greatest confidence in me; in fact, I had no cause to complain of his treatment of me.

Make us your slaves, but feed us.

The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

War is horrible, but slavery is worse.

We stole their babes and mothers, chiefs and braves Although we held the whip, you knew we were The real slaves To alchemy, human alchemy.

There are a few men whom slavery holds fast, but there are many more who hold fast to slavery.

That slow poison [slavery] is daily contaminating the minds and morals of our people. Every gentlemen here is born a petty tyrant, practiced in acts of despotism and cruelty.

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong.

Cancer runs in our family. I lost my grandmother to it. There's a saying that you meet people and instantly know them. My grandmother and I had that. The first time my heart was broken was when my grandmother passed away. I was twenty-one.

Slavery is malignantly aristocratic.

Some slaves are scoured to their work by whips, others by their restlessness and ambition.