Harriet Ann Jacobs

There must be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of morality, and, in fact, renders…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

“Who can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

“It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

“I remained abroad ten months, which was much longer than I had anticipated. During all that time, I never saw the slightest…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

But I now entered on my fifteenth year - a sad epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

For years, my master had done his utmost to pollute my mind with foul images, and to destroy the pure principles inculcated…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

“Several years after, he passed through our town and preached to his former congregation. In his afternoon sermon he addressed the colored…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

“Are doctors of divinity blind or are they hypocrites?”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

I WAS born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

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

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I learned, by the talk around me,…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

When my babe was born, they said it was premature. It weighed only four pounds; but God let it live.

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

Dr. Flint had sworn that he would make me suffer, to my last day, for this new crime against him, as he…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

When they told me my new-born babe was a girl, my heart was heavier than it had ever been before. Slavery is…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

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

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

But to the slave mother New Year's day comes laden with peculiar sorrows. She sits on her cold cabin floor, watching the…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

“It is a sad feeling to be afraid of one's native country.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

Death is better than slavery.

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

The beautiful spring came; and when Nature resumes her loveliness, the human soul is apt to revive also.

— Harriet Ann Jacobs