101 Quotes by Harriet Ann Jacobs

Death is better than slavery.

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings. This was blasphemous doctrine for a slave to teach; presumptuous in him, and dangerous to the masters.

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.

Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.

There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.

My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.

The degradation, the wrongs, the vices, that grow out of slavery, are more than I can describe. They are greater than you would willingly believe.

I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.