Top 70 Harriet Ann Jacobs Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Death is better than slavery.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

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

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

3. “There are no bonds so strong as those which are formed by suffering together.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

Featured in: Strong Quotes

4. “No pen can give an adequate description of the all-pervading corruption produced by slavery.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

5. “The war of my life had begun; and though one of God’s most powerless creatures, I resolved never to be conquered.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

6. “My master had power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

7. “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

8. “There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

9. “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

10. “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

11. “Cruelty is contagious in uncivilized communities.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

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

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

13. “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

14. “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

15. “Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

16. “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

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

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

18. “When we left the church, my father’s old mistress invited me to go home with her. She clasped a gold chain round my baby’s neck. I thanked her for the kindness; but I did not like the emblem. I wanted no chain to be fastened on my daughter, not even if its links were of gold.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

19. “Always it gave me a pang that my children had no lawful claim to a name.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

20. “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

21. “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 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 Ann Jacobs

22. “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

23. “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

24. “The slave girl is reared in an atmosphere of licentiousness and fear.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

25. “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

26. “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 Ann Jacobs

27. “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

28. “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

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

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

30. “So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

31. “Friend! It is a common word, often lightly used. Like other good and beautiful things, it may be tarnished by careless handling; but when I speak of Mrs. Bruce as my friend, the word is sacred.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

32. “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

33. “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

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

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

35. “I could scarcely summon courage to rise. But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

36. “When I was nearly twelve years old, my kind mistress sickened and died.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

37. “After the alarm caused by Nat Turner’s insurrection had subsided, the slaveholders came to the conclusion that it would be well to give the slaves enough of religious instruction to keep them from murdering their masters.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

38. “In view of these things, why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right? Would that I had more ability! But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak! There are noble men and women who plead for us, striving to help those who cannot help themselves. God bless them! God give them strength and courage to go on! God bless those, every where, who are laboring to advance the cause of humanity!”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

39. “At the end, he had large possessions; but I was robbed of my victory; I was obliged to resign my crown, to rid myself of a tyrant.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

40. “Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves?”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

41. “There are thousands, who, like good uncle Fred, are thirsting for the water of life; but the law forbids it, and the churches withhold it. They send the Bible to heathen abroad, and neglect the heathen at home. I am glad that missionaries go out to the dark corners of the earth; but I ask them not to overlook the dark corners at home.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

42. “Being in servitude to the Anglo-Saxon race, I was not put into a “Jim Crow car,” on our way to Rockaway, neither was I invited to ride through the streets on the top of trunks in a truck; but every where I found the same manifestations of that cruel prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the energies of the colored people.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

43. “He was an ill-bred, uneducated man, but very wealthy.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

44. “Who can blame slaves for being cunning? They are constantly compelled to resort to it. It is the only weapon of the weak and oppressed against the strength of their tyrants.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

45. “Sometimes I thought God was a compassionate Father, who would forgive my sins for the sake of my sufferings. At other times, it seemed to me there was no justice or mercy in the divine government. I asked why the curse of slavery was permitted to exist, and why I had been so persecuted and wronged from youth upward. These things took the shape of mystery, which is to this day not so clear to my soul as I trust it will be hereafter.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

46. “My aunt was taken out of jail at the end of a month, because Mrs. Flint could not spare her any longer. She was tired of being her own housekeeper. It was quite too fatiguing to order her dinner and eat it too.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

47. “Gott beurteilt die Menschen nach ihren Herzen und nicht nach ihrer Hautfarbe.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

48. “I cannot say, with truth, that the news of my old master’s death softened my feelings towards him. There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury. The man was odious to me while he lived, and his memory is odious now.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

49. “Lives that flash in sunshine, and lives that are born in tears, receive their hue from circumstances. None of us know what a year may bring forth.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs

50. “After a brief period of suspense, the will of my mistress was read, and we learned that she had bequeathed me to her sister’s daughter, a child of five years old. So vanished our hopes. 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.”2 But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me as her neighbor.”

— Harriet Ann Jacobs