mistreatment Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“O why have you treated me so monstrously, Angel! I do not deserve it. I have thought it all over carefully, and I can never, never forgive you!”

“I dragged that filthy thing out of the river muck in South America, and along the way we didn’t get to like each other much. You may think that thing looks human, stands on two legs right? But we’re created in the Lord’s image. You don’t think that’s what the Lord looks like?”

“I haven’t been treated this way—lined up in the corridor, threatened with locker searches, peppered with carelessly aimed accusations—since at least junior high school.”

“No, no! you never had a good place where they were kind to you, and so you don’t know, and I’m sorry for you”

“And so,” she said, “here we are, ruined in the prime of our youth and strength, you by a drunkard, and I by a fool; it is very hard.”

“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.

“The slave-owner can whip his refractory slave to death,—the capitalist can starve him to death.”

“That animal has a charmed life,′ he said; ‘but you can say this only of brutes in this country. No man—you apprehend me?—no man here bears a charmed life.’

“No, you won’t. Set down and stay where you are. I ain’t going to hurt you, and I ain’t going to tell on you, nuther. You just tell me your secret, and trust me. I’ll keep it; and, what’s more, I’ll help you. So’ll my old man if you want him to. You see, you’re a runaway ‘prentice, that’s all. It ain’t anything. There ain’t no harm in it. You’ve been treated bad, and you made up your mind to cut. Bless you, child, I wouldn’t tell on you. Tell me all about it now, that’s a good boy.”