Top 40 Sojourner Truth Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I feel safe in the midst of my enemies, for the truth is all powerful and will prevail.”

— Sojourner Truth

Featured in: Strong Women Quotes, Truth Quotes

2. “Truth is powerful and it prevails.”

— Sojourner Truth

3. “It is the mind that makes the body.”

— Sojourner Truth

4. “Life is a hard battle anyway. If we laugh and sing a little as we fight the good fight of freedom, it makes it all go easier. I will not allow my life’s light to be determined by the darkness around me.”

— Sojourner Truth

5. “The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.”

— Sojourner Truth

6. “And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother’s grief none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?”

— Sojourner Truth

7. “I am not going to die, I’m going home like a shooting star.”

— Sojourner Truth

8. “When I left the house of bondage I left everything behind. I wanted to keep nothing of Egypt on me, and so I went to the Lord and asked him to give me a new name.”

— Sojourner Truth

9. “Truth burns up error.”

— Sojourner Truth

10. “Then I will speak upon the ashes.”

— Sojourner Truth

11. “The Spirit calls me, and I must go.”

— Sojourner Truth

12. “If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back, and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.”

— Sojourner Truth

13. “I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring. Because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.”

— Sojourner Truth

14. “Because of them I can now live the dream. I am the seed of the free, and I know it. I intend to bear great fruit.”

— Sojourner Truth

15. “It is hard for the old slave holding spirit to die. But die it must.”

— Sojourner Truth

16. “Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff.”

— Sojourner Truth

17. “If women want rights more than they got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it.”

— Sojourner Truth

18. “I am glad to see that men are getting their rights, but I want women to get theirs, and while the water is stirring, I will step into the pool.”

— Sojourner Truth

19. “If my cup won’t hold but a pint and yourn holds a quart, wouldn’t ye be mean not to let me have my little half-measure full?”

— Sojourner Truth

20. “Those are the same stars, and that is the same moon, that look down upon your brothers and sisters, and which they see as they look up to them, though they are ever so far away from us, and each other.”

— Sojourner Truth

21. “Christ came from God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.”

— Sojourner Truth

22. “Where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter.”

— Sojourner Truth

23. “That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?”

— Sojourner Truth

24. “Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.”

— Sojourner Truth

25. “I don’t read such small stuff as letters, I read men and nations. I can see through a millstone, though I can’t see through a spelling-book. What a narrow idea a reading qualification is for a voter!”

— Sojourner Truth

26. “Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.”

— Sojourner Truth

27. “I am above eighty years old; it is about time for me to be going. I have been forty years a slave and forty years free and would be here forty years more to have equal rights for all.”

— Sojourner Truth

28. “We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.”

— Sojourner Truth

29. “You have been having our rights so long, that you think, like a slave-holder, that you own us. I know that it is hard for one who has held the reins for so long to give up; it cuts like a knife. It will feel all the better when it closes up again.”

— Sojourner Truth

30. “And ar’n’t I a woman?”

— Sojourner Truth

31. “I am a woman’s rights. I have as much as any man, and can do as much work as any man. I have plowed and reaped and chopped and mowed, and can any man do more than that?”

— Sojourner Truth

32. “Oh no, honey, I can’t read little things like letters. I read big things like men.”

— Sojourner Truth

33. “If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there.”

— Sojourner Truth

34. “Many slaveholders boast of the love of their slaves. How would it freeze the blood of some of them to know what kind of love rankles in the bosoms of slaves for them! Witness the attempt to poison Mrs. Calhoun, and hundreds of similar cases. Most ‘surprising ’ to every body, because committed by slaves supposed to be so grateful for their chains.”

— Sojourner Truth

35. “We have all been thrown down so low that nobody thought we’d ever get up again; but we have been long enough trodden now; we will come up again, and now I am here.”

— Sojourner Truth

36. “Now, if you want me to get out of the world, you had better get the women votin’ soon. I shan’t go till I can do that.”

— Sojourner Truth

37. “I tell you I can’t read a book, but I can read de people.”

— Sojourner Truth

38. “What we give to the poor, we lend to the Lord.”

— Sojourner Truth

39. “Yes,′ she said, ’the rich rob the poor, and the poor rob one another.”

— Sojourner Truth

40. “This is beautiful indeed; the colored people have given this to the head of the government, and that government once sanctioned laws that would not permit its people to learn enough to enable them to read this book.”

— Sojourner Truth

41. “And what is that religion that sanctions, even by its silence, all that is embraced in the ‘Peculiar Institution’? If there can be any thing more diametrically opposed to the religion of Jesus, than the working of this soul-killing system – which is as truly sanctioned by the religion of America as are her minsters and churches – we wish to be shown where it can be found.”

— Sojourner Truth

42. “As we were walking the other day, she said she had often thought what a beautiful world this would be, when we should see every thing right side up. Now, we see every thing topsy-turvy, and all is confusion.”

— Sojourner Truth

43. “You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway.”

— Sojourner Truth

44. “Oh Lord,′ inquired Isabella, ‘what is this slavery, that it can do such dreadful things? what evil can it not do?’ Well may she ask, for surely the evils it can and does do, daily and hourly, can never be summed up, till we can see them as they are recorded by him who writes no errors, and reckons without mistake.”

— Sojourner Truth

45. “Look there above the center, where the flag is waving bright; We are going out of slavery, we are bound for freedom’s light; We mean to show Jeff Davis how the Africans can fight...”

— Sojourner Truth

46. “All who eat swine’s flesh are of the devil; and just as certain as he eats it, he will tell a lie in less than half an hour. If you eat a piece of pork, it will go crooked through you, and the Holy Ghost will not stay in you, but one or the other must leave the house pretty soon. The pork will be as crooked in you as ram’s horns, and as great a nuisance as the hogs in the street.”

— Sojourner Truth

47. “Den dat little man in black dar, he say women can’t have as much rights as men, ‘cause Christ wan’t a woman! Whar did your Christ come from?” Rolling thunder couldn’t have stilled that crowd, as did those deep, wonderful tones, as she stood there with outstretched arms and eyes of fire. Raising her voice still louder, she repeated, “Whar did your Christ come from? From God and a woman!”

— Sojourner Truth

48. “Think you, dear reader, when that day comes, the most ‘rapid abolitionist’ will say-‘Behold, I saw all this while on the earth?’ Will he not rather say, ‘Oh, who has conceived the breadth and depth of this moral malaria, this putrescent plague-spot?’ Perhaps the pioneers in the slave’s cause will be as much surprised as any to find that with all their looking, there remained so much unseen.”

— Sojourner Truth

49. “In heartening contrast to our own “culture of complaint,” in which the idea of human solidarity seems lost in the clamor of victim groups competing for attention and entitlement, Sojourner Truth grew to understand that her personal quest for freedom was meaningful only as a moment in a larger struggle against the burden of injustice.”

— Sojourner Truth