Harriet Jacobs Quotes

36 Sourced Quotes

The secrets of slavery are concealed like those of the Inquisition.

Harriet Jacobs
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 Jacobs
Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free.

Harriet Jacobs
There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together

Harriet Jacobs
I can testify, from my own experience and observation, that slavery is a curse to the whites as well as to the blacks. It makes the white fathers cruel and sensual; the sons violent and licentious; it contaminates the daughters, and makes the wives wretched. And as for the colored race, it needs an abler pen than mine to describe the extremity of their sufferings, the depth of their degradation.

Harriet Jacobs
The war of my life had begun; and though one of God's most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.

Harriet Jacobs
Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.

Harriet Jacobs
Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.

Harriet Jacobs
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 Jacobs
[My parents] lived together in a comfortable home; and, though we were all slaves I was so fondly shielded that I never dreamed I was a piece of merchandise, trusted to them for safe keeping, and liable to be demanded of them at any moment.

Harriet Jacobs
Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other.

Harriet Jacobs