Harriet Ann Jacobs Quotes

“She was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed.”

“I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do…Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”

“There is a great difference between Christianity and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious.”

“I would ten thousand times rather that my children should be the half-starved paupers of Ireland than to be the most pampered among the slaves of America.”

“My story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage.”

“He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure principles my grandmother had instilled . . . But he was my master. I was compelled to live under the same roof with him.”

“God alone knows how much I have suffered; and He, I trust, will forgive me. If I am permitted to have my children, I intend to be a good mother, and to live in such a manner that people cannot treat me with contempt.”

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

“The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own.”

“If slavery had been abolished I too could have married the man of my choice; I could have had a home shielded by the laws.”

“On no other occasion has it ever been my lot to listen to so fervent a supplication for mercy and protection. It thrilled through my heart, and inspired me with trust in God.”

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

“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…”

“We knelt down together, with my child pressed to my heart, and my other arm round the faithful, loving old friend I was about to leave forever.”

“Whatever slavery might do to me, it could not shackle my children.”

“Some are too much brutalized by slavery to feel the humiliation of their position; but many slaves feel it most acutely, and shrink from the memory of it.”

“Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.”

“She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from her childhood; but she has a mother’s instincts, and is capable of a mother’s agonies.”

“I thought that if he was my own father, he ought to love me. I was a little girl then, and didn’t know any better.”

“Reader, it is not to awaken sympathy for myself that I am telling you truthfully what I suffered in slavery. I do it to kindle a flame of compassion in your hearts for my sisters who are still in bondage, suffering as I once suffered.”

“I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks.”