George Harris Quotes

“A very humane jurist once said, The worst use you can put a man to is to hang him. No; there is another use that a man can be put to that is WORSE!”

“There now, Eliza, it’s too bad for me to make you feel so, poor girl!” said he, fondly; “it’s too bad: O, how I wish you never had seen me—you might have been happy!”

“Then drawing his child on his knee, he gazed intently on his glorious dark eyes, and passed his hands through his long curls.”

“Patient!” said he, interrupting her; “haven’t I been patient? Did I say a word when he came and took me away, for no earthly reason, from the place where everybody was kind to me? I’d paid him truly every cent of my earnings,—and they all say I worked well.

“My master! and who made him my master? That’s what I think of—what right has he to me? I’m a man as much as he is. I’m a better man than he is. I know more about business than he does; I am a better manager than he is; I can read better than he can; I can write a better hand,—and I’ve learned it all myself, and no thanks to him,—I’ve learned it in spite of him; and now what right has he to make a dray-horse of me?—to take me from things I can do, and do better than he can, and put me to work that any horse can do? He tries to do it; he says he’ll bring me down and humble me, and he puts me to just the hardest, meanest and dirtiest work, on purpose!”

“I have been careful, and I have been patient, but it’s growing worse and worse; flesh and blood can’t bear it any longer;—every chance he can get to insult and torment me, he takes.”

“What are you going to do? O, George, don’t do anything wicked; if you only trust in God, and try to do right, he’ll deliver you.”

“I an’t a Christian like you, Eliza; my heart’s full of bitterness; I can’t trust in God. Why does he let things be so?”

“That’s easy to say for people that are sitting on their sofas and riding in their carriages; but let ‘em be where I am, I guess it would come some harder. I wish I could be good; but my heart burns, and can’t be reconciled, anyhow. You couldn’t in my place,—you can’t now, if I tell you all I’ve got to say. You don’t know the whole yet.”

“I tell you, Eliza, that a sword will pierce through your soul for every good and pleasant thing your child is or has; it will make him worth too much for you to keep.”

“I won’t be taken, Eliza; I’ll die first! I’ll be free, or I’ll die!”

“You must give my love to him, and tell him, if I never see him again,” she turned away, and stood with her back to them for a moment, and then added, in a husky voice, “tell him to be as good as he can, and try and meet me in the kingdom of heaven.”

“Don’t quote Bible at me that way, Mr. Wilson,” said George, with a flashing eye, “don’t! for my wife is a Christian, and I mean to be, if ever I get to where I can; but to quote Bible to a fellow in my circumstances, is enough to make him give it up altogether. I appeal to God Almighty;—I’m willing to go with the case to Him, and ask Him if I do wrong to seek my freedom.

“My country again! Mr. Wilson, you have a country; but what country have I, or any one like me, born of slave mothers? What laws are there for us? We don’t make them,—we don’t consent to them,—we have nothing to do with them; all they do for us is to crush us, and keep us down.”

″‘look at me, now. Don’t I sit before you, every way, just as much a man as you are? Look at my face,—look at my hands,—look at my body... why am I not a man, as much as anybody?”

“Why, sir, I’ve been so hungry that I have been glad to take the bones they threw to their dogs;”

″...and yet, when I was a little fellow, and laid awake whole nights and cried, it wasn’ t the hunger, it wasn’ t the whipping, I cried for. No, sir, it was for my mother and my sisters,—it was because I hadn’t a friend to love me on earth.”

“Gone, sir gone, with her child in her arms, the Lord only knows where;—gone after the north star; and when we ever meet, or whether we meet at all in this world, no creature can tell.”

″...for slavery always ends in misery.”

“O! Eliza, if these people only knew what a blessing it is for a man to feel that his wife and child belong to him!”

“Why, I feel rich and strong, though we have nothing but our bare hands.”

“Yes, though I’ve worked hard every day, till I am twenty-five years old, and have not a cent of money, nor a roof to cover me, nor a spot of land to call my own, yet, if they will only let me alone now, I will be satisfied,—thankful;”

“George stood with clenched hands and glowing eyes, and looking as any other man might look, whose wife was to be sold at auction, and son sent to a trader, all under the shelter of a Christian nation’s laws.”

“People that have friends, and houses, and lands, and money, and all those things can’t love as we do, who have nothing but each other.”

“And your loving me,—why, it was almost like raising one from the dead! I’ve been a new man ever since!”

“But you haven’ t got us. We don’ t own your laws; we don’ t own your country; we stand here as free, under God’s sky, as you are; and, by the great God that made us, we’ll fight for our liberty till we die.”

“What is freedom to that young man, who sits there, with his arms folded over his broad chest, the tint of African blood in his cheek, its dark fires in his eyes,—what is freedom to George Harris?”

“To your fathers, freedom was the right of a nation to be a nation. To him, it is the right of a man to be a man, and not a brute; the right to call the wife of his bosom his wife, and to protect her from lawless violence; the right to protect and educate his child; the right to have a home of his own, a religion of his own, a character of his own, unsubject to the will of another.”

“What is freedom to a nation, but freedom to the individuals in it?”

“Give me an education, Emily; that has always been my heart’s desire. Then, I can do all the rest.”

“On the shores of Africa I see a republic,—a republic formed of picked men, who, by energy and self-educating force, have, in many cases, individually, raised themselves above a condition of slavery.”

“Whatever you may think of my determination, do not divorce me from your confidence; and think that, in whatever I do, I act with a heart wholly given to my people.”