Top 60 Quotes About Harriet Jacobs
#1. Love is to be feared by power because it leads to rebellion. "Why do slaves love?" asked ex-slave Harriet Jacobs and I think the answer is, because it is in the human fibre to do so, to exercise this natural power to (re)create the world.
Rod Dubey
#2. Reader, did you ever hate? I hope not. I never did but once; and I trust I never shall again. Somebody has called it "the atmosphere of hell"; and I believe it is so.
Harriet Jacobs
#3. I would rather drudge out my life on a cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled master and a jealous mistress.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#4. He grew vexed and asked if poverty and hardships with freedom, were not preferable to our treatment in slavery ... No, I will not stay. Let them bring me back. We don't die but once.
Harriet Jacobs
#6. They had never felt slavery; and, when it was too late, they were convinced of its reality. When
Harriet Jacobs
#7. The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#8. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings.
Harriet Jacobs
#9. Ah, if he had ever been a slave he would have known how difficult it was to trust white men.
Harriet Jacobs
#10. I am aware that some of my adventures may seem incredible; but they are, nevertheless, strictly true. I
Harriet Jacobs
#11. If a slave is unwilling to go with his new master, he is whipped, or locked up in jail, until he consents to go, and promises not to run away during the year.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#13. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment
Harriet Jacobs
#14. Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#15. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#16. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#17. No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#18. But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#19. When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#20. As I was about to open the street door, Sally laid her hand on my shoulder, and said, "Linda, is you gwine all
Harriet Jacobs
#21. My Master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.
Harriet Jacobs
#22. It seemed as if I were born to bring sorrow on all who befriended me, and that was the bitterest drop in the bitter cup of my life.
Harriet Jacobs
#23. My mistress had taught me the precepts of God's Word: "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." "Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye even so unto them.
Harriet Jacobs
#24. Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#25. The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#26. Do you know that I have a right to do as I like with you, - that I can kill you, if I please?" "You
Harriet Jacobs
#27. Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#29. Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#30. When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#31. I admit that the black man is inferior. But what is it that makes him so? It is the ignorance in which white men compel him to live;
Harriet Jacobs
#32. When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#33. I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#34. She may be an ignorant creature, degraded by the system that has brutalized her from childhood; but she has a mother's instincts, and is capable of feeling a mother's agonies.
Harriet Jacobs
#35. The scripture says "oppression makes it even a wise man mad" ...
Harriet Jacobs
#36. No, I did not think of him. When a man is hunted like a wild beast he forgets there is a God, a heaven. He forgets every thing in his struggle to get beyond the reach of the bloodhounds.
Harriet Jacobs
#37. But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the children who may all be torn from her the next morning; and often does she wish that she and they might die before the day dawns.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#38. When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#39. The brightest skies are always foreshadowed by dark clouds
Harriet Jacobs
#40. For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated by my grandmother, and the good mistress of my childhood.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#41. Why allow the tendrils of the heart to twine around objects which may at any moment be wrenched away
Harriet Jacobs
#42. Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#43. There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.
Harriet Jacobs
#44. Yet few slaveholders seem to be aware of the widespread moral ruin occasioned by this wicked system. Their talk is of blighted cotton crops
not of the blight on their children's souls.
Harriet Jacobs
#45. Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he called it; and as long as he had me in his power he kept his word.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#46. If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#48. Would that I had more ability! But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak!
Harriet Jacobs
#49. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they
Harriet Jacobs
#50. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#51. There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#52. Satan's church is here below; Up to God's free church I hope to go.
Harriet Jacobs
#53. The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#54. I had never realized what grand things air and sunlight are till I had been deprived of them.
Harriet Jacobs
#55. 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.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#56. Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.
Harriet Ann Jacobs
#57. The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.
Harriet Jacobs
#58. God judges men by their hearts, not by the color of their skins.
Harriet Jacobs
#59. They all spoke kindly of my dead mother, who had been a slave merely in name, but in nature was noble and womanly.
Harriet Jacobs
#60. Take courage, Willie; brighter days will come by and by.
Harriet Jacobs
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