Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)

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Witness, eternal God! Oh, witness that, from this hour, I will do what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from my land!

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Cause I's wicked, - I is. I's mighty wicked, anyhow, I can't help it.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
After all, let a man take what pains he may to hush it down, a human soul is an awful, ghostly, unquiet possession for a bad man to have. Who knows the metes and bounds of it? Who knows all its awful perhapses,--those shudderings and tremblings, which it can no more live down than it can outlive its own eternity?

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The number of those men who know how to use wholly irresponsible power humanely and generously is small. Everybody knows this, and the slave knows it best of all.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The longest day must have its close — the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments is ever hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The Lord gives good many things twice over; but he don't give ye a mother but once.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Do you know who made you? Nobody as I knows on, said the child, with a short laugh … I 'spect I growed. Don't think nobody never made me.
Topsy is speaking

Harriet Beecher Stowe
To fill up Liberia with an ignorant, inexperienced, half-barbarized race, just escaped from the chains of slavery, would be only to prolong, for ages, the period of struggle and conflict which attends the inception of new enterprises.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The hand of benevolence is everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The heaviest anguish often precedes a return tide of joy and courage.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
I am one of the sort that lives by throwing stones at other people's glass houses, but I never mean to put up one for them to stone.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Great, tall, raw-boned Kentuckians, attired in hunting shirts, and trailing their loose joints over a vast extent of territory with the easy lounge peculiar to the race.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
O, because I have had only that kind of benevolence which consists in lying on a sofa, and cursing the church and clergy for not being martyrs and confessors. One can see, you know, very easily, how others ought to be martyrs.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
What's your hurry?" Because now is the only time there ever is to do a thing in," said Miss Ophelia.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
There are in this world blessed souls, whose sorrows all spring up into joys for others; whose earthly hopes, laid in the grave with many tears, are the seed from which spring healing flowers and balm for the desolate and the distressed.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
The heart has no tears to give; it drops only blood, bleeding itself away in silence.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Talk of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse!

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Miss Ophelia was the absolute bond-slave of the 'ought.'

Harriet Beecher Stowe
By what strange law of mind is it that an idea long overlooked, and trodden under foot as a useless stone, suddenly sparkles out in new light, as a discovered diamond?

Harriet Beecher Stowe
We hear often of the distress of the negro servants, on the loss of a kind master; and with good reason, for no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
A mighty influence is abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Eliza made her desperate retreat across the river just in the dusk of twilight. The gray mist of evening, rising slowly from the river, enveloped her as she disappeared up the bank, and the swollen current and floundering masses of ice presented a hopeless barrier between her and her pursuer.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
Strange, what brings these past things so vividly back to us, sometimes!

Harriet Beecher Stowe
All men are free and equal in the grave, if it comes to that.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
I [Topsy] 'spect I grow'd. Don't think nobody never made me.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
He who has nothing to lose can afford all risks.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
So subtle is the atmosphere of opinion that it will make itself felt without words.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved, — but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God!

Harriet Beecher Stowe
I b'lieve in religion, and one of these days, when I've got matters tight and snug, I calculates to tend to my soul.

Harriet Beecher Stowe
O, ye who visit the distressed, do ye know that everything your money can buy, given with a cold, averted face, is not worth one honest tear shed in real sympathy?

Harriet Beecher Stowe