Sojourner Truth Slave Quotes

In the upstate farmhouse he had dubbed Mount Zion, Matthias had apparently established for himself a community of seven wives - a "harem," Locke called it - six of them wealthy white women and the seventh a black servant by the name of Isabella Van Wagenen, and "had one appointed to each working day in the week, and the black one consecrated for Sundays." (Isabella Van Wagenen was a former slave who would later join the abolitionist movement, changing her name to the one by which she would be forever remembered: Sojourner Truth.) ~ Matthew Goodman

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

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

It is hard for the old slave holding spirit to die. But die it must. ~ Sojourner Truth

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain't got nothing more to say. ~ Sojourner Truth

And ar'n't I a woman? ~ Sojourner Truth

I feel safe in the midst of my enemies, for the truth is all powerful and will prevail. ~ Sojourner Truth

It is the mind that makes the body. ~ Sojourner Truth

You may hiss as much as you please, but women will get their rights anyway ~ Sojourner Truth

If it is not a fit place for women, it is unfit for men to be there. ~ Sojourner Truth

I tell you I can't read a book, but I can read de people. ~ Sojourner Truth

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

Let others say what they will of the efficacy of prayer, I believe in it, and I shall pray. Thank God! Yes, I shall always pray, ~ Sojourner Truth

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

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

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

We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much. ~ Sojourner Truth

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

The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another. ~ Sojourner Truth

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

I am above eighty years old ... I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked. ~ Sojourner Truth

When I left the house of bondage I left everything behind. I wasn't going to keep nothing of Egypt on me, an' so I went to the Lord an' asked him to give me a new name. And he gave me Sojourner because I was to travel up and down the land showing the people their sins and bein' a sign unto them. I told the Lord I wanted two names 'cause everybody else had two, and the Lord gave me Truth, because I was to declare the truth to the people. ~ Sojourner Truth

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

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

Let ... individuals make the most of what God has given them, have their neighbors do the same, and then do all they can to serve each other. There is no use in one man, or one nation, to try to do or be everything. It is a good thing to be dependent on each other for something, it makes us civil and peaceable. ~ Sojourner Truth

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

Children, who made your skin white? Was it not God? Who made mine black? Was it not the same God? Am I to blame, therefore, because my skin is black?...Does not God love coloured children as well as white children? And did not the same Saviour die to save the one as well as the other? ~ Sojourner Truth

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored
men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So 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

I must sojourn once to the ballot-box before I die. I hear the ballot-box is a beautiful glass globe, so you can see all the votesas they go in. Now, the first time I vote I'll see if the woman's vote looks any different from the rest
if it makes any stir or commotion. If it don't inside, it need not outside. ~ Sojourner Truth

Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth were slaves by birth, freedom fighters by temperament. ~ Nancy Gibbs

When evil rules a time and place, certain good people are called upon to tell the truth to those who don't want to hear it. ~ Anne F. Rockwell

Some of our national heroines were defined by the fact that they never nested - they were peripatetic crusaders like Susan B. Anthony, Clara Barton, Sojourner Truth, Dorothy Dix. ~ Gail Collins

The violinist must possess the poet's gift of piercing the protective hide which grows on propagandists, stockbrokers and slave traders, to penetrate the deeper truth which lies within. ~ Yehudi Menuhin

A slave-holder cannot hold a slave without putting himself or his deputy in the cage for holding the slave. ~ Mahatma Gandhi

I believe that it is better to tell the truth than a lie. I believe it is better to be free than to be a slave. And I believe it is better to know than to be ignorant. ~ H.L. Mencken

Though I was excited about the Sojourner Truth play, it was not reassuring to think that my entire future might depend on the success of that one show. ~ Ethel Waters

All the heroes of black emancipation - from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln - were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth. ~ Dinesh D'Souza

Quing-Jao: I am a slave to the gods, and I rejoice in it.
Jane: A slave who rejoices is a slave indeed. ~ Orson Scott Card

The covetous person is full of fear; and he or she who lives in fear will ever be a slave. ~ Horace

When I was young, my father taught me a slave had only one duty: TO BURN DOWN THE PLANTATION. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

They were men, and free. I was a woman, and a slave. And that's a chasm no amount of sentimental chit-chat about shared imprisonment should be allowed to obscure. ~ Pat Barker

Hindustan had become free. Pakistan had become independent soon after its inception but man was still slave in both these countries
slave of prejudice ... slave of religious fanaticism ... slave of barbarity and inhumanity. ~ Saadat Hasan Manto

I think the person who takes a job in order to live - that is to say, for the money [not for purpose or passion]- has turned himself into a slave. ~ Joseph Campbell

Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor. ~ Norbert Wiener

The good man, though a slave, is free; the wicked, though he reigns, is a slave, and not the slave of a single man, but - what is worse - the slave of as many masters as he has vices. ~ Rubianne Wood

Whoever wants to be free, therefore, let him not want or avoid anything that is up to others. Otherwise he will necessarily be a slave. ~ Epictetus

Stomach: A slave that must accept everything that is given to it, but which avenges wrongs as slyly as does the slave. ~ Emile Souvestre

No more lies, little slave. I want all of you--your honest truth. You're mine. Even your tears are mine." ~His Human Slave ~ Renee Rose

A woman who does not become the slave of just one man becomes the slave of all men. ~ Jose Bergamin

He is always a slave who cannot live on little. ~ Horace

A well-paid slave is nonetheless a slave. ~ Curt Flood

Knowledge unfits a child to be a slave. ~ Frederick Douglass

The duty I owe to the slave, to truth, and to God, demands that I should use my pen and tongue so long as life and health are vouchsafed to me to employ them, or until the last chain shall fall from the limbs of the last slave in America and the world. ~ William Wells Brown

Grigsby's marvelous exploration-a deep, wide, and beautiful inquiry into Sojourner Truth's use of technology-features more of her photographs than have ever been collected before. Among its many insights, I especially relished the analysis of Truth's illiteracy. Enduring Truths is art history with a wide-ranging concept of history left in. A terrific book, and one we've needed for a long time. ~ Nell Irvin Painter

Every day I wear my Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth medallions around my neck. When I think I'm having a bad day, I try to think about their day, and I get up. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

None can be free who is a slave to, and ruled by, his passions. ~ Pythagoras

Growing up is not easy for anyone but for anyone to deliberately block the path of the child from their family, it is nothing short of a sin." Lowering her voice a little she quietly said, "I believe she has done us all an injustice." The smile that she gave Melanie lit up her entire face as she patted the scrapbook. "Please look over the book and call me anytime. I don't sleep much and I will be here for you. ~ Sojourner McConnell

I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ, but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ. ~ George MacDonald

The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty, but to have a slave of his own. ~ Richard Francis Burton

Is base in kind, and born to be a slave. ~ William Cowper

I was a coward and a slave. I say this without the slightest embarrassment. Every decent man of our age must be a coward and a slave. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Sojourner [Truth]'s life exemplifies the process that occurs within ourselves as we grow to understand that we hold the authority to shape our own lives. This inner authority came when she embraced all of herself, which enabled her to speak from an authentic voice. ~ Helen LaKelly Hunt

Let us remember that the automatic machine is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic consequences of slave labor. ~ Norbert Wiener

The man who asks of freedom anything other than itself is born to be a slave. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

The man born and bred a slave, even if freed, never loses wholly the feeling or manner of a slave. ~ Mary C. Ames

This is what it means to be a slave; to be abused and bear it; compelled by violence to suffer wrong. ~ Euripides

Nobody had ever instructed him that a slave-ship, with a procession of expectant sharks in its wake, is a missionary institution, by which closely-packed heathen are brought over to enjoy the light of the Gospel. ~ Harriet Beecher Stowe

TRUTH: When a child believes he must win to be worthy, when young adults define themselves by what they do and not who they are, it is a kind of slavery a slave master would envy. ~ Tom Shadyac

A human being who trades away individuality for conformity is nothing but a slave. ~ Auliq Ice

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off. ~ John Henrik Clarke

Who dares not speak his free thought is a slave. ~ Euripides

What shall we think of a well-adjusted slave? ~ Abraham Maslow

Hope is incredible to the slave of grief. ~ Petrarch

No more slave States; no slave Territories. ~ Salmon P. Chase

You say, Wait a minute, God, you spared me from a slave job in an office, and now I have a slave job onstage. I am not on that clock no more. ~ Lauryn Hill

A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years. ~ Lysander Spooner

You're a Good Little Slave ~ Mark Lawrence

The better you treat a slave, the more you destroy his value as a slave, and enhance the probability of his eluding the grasp of the slaveholder; the more kindly you treat him, the more wretched you make him, while you keep him in the condition of a slave. ~ Frederick Douglass

Each man must create his own system or else he is a slave to another mans ~ William Blake

A Gorean slave girl in the presence of a free man or woman always kneels, unless excused from doing so. ~ John Norman

If you see anybody wail and complain, call him a slave, though he be clad in purple. ~ Epictetus

E have men sold to build churches, women sold to support the gospel, and babes sold to purchase Bibles for the poor heathen, all for the glory of God and the good of souls. The slave auctioneer's bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave trade go hand in hand. ~ Frederick Douglass

No one is truly free, they are a slave to wealth, fortune, the law, or other people restraining them from acting according to their will. ~ Euripides

Man cannot relinquish himself or the place in the visible world that belongs to him; he cannot become the slave of things, the slave of economic systems, the slave of production, the slave of his own products. A civilization purely materialistic in outline condemns man to such slavery, even if at times, no doubt, this occurs contrary to the intentions and the very premise of its pioneers. ~ Pope John Paul II

I read slave narratives, books like Bullwhip Days, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. [The Root's chairman] Henry Louis Gates has an amazing documentary called Many Rivers to Cross - really, his whole writings; he's such a wealth of knowledge. ~ Jurnee Smollett

Gold will be slave or master. ~ Horace

You shall not wrong a sojourner or oppress him, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt. ~ Anonymous

To Xeniades, who had purchased Diogenes at the slave market, he said, Come, see that you obey orders. ~ Diogenes

If I must be a slave to habit let me be a slave to good habits. ~ Og Mandino

A man in chains need not be a slave. If he has pride and self-respect he is a free man though a prisoner, and a constant danger to his jailers. Conversely, a slave who escapes is not a free man, but a runaway slave who may be caught and returned to servitude. A slave is one who accepts the identity ascribed to him by a master: You are an inferior and unworthy person and so will remain, and therefore must serve me with obedience and humility. ~ Allen Wheelis

Whoever has not two-thirds of his time to himself, is a slave. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I am the slave of an internal power more powerful than my education. ~ Arnold Schoenberg

Money, as it increases, becomes either the master or the slave of ts owner. ~ Horace

The man who is master of his passions is Reason's slave. ~ Cyril Connolly

It is better to be a slave to your beloved woman than a free man to the unloved one. ~ Eric Berne

The master is a slave when he fears those whom he rules. ~ Publilius Syrus

I'd rather be called a N*gger than a Slave. ~ Roger Ebert

The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred. ~ Henry Louis Gates

No man in his senses can hesitate in choosing to be free, rather than a slave. ~ Alexander Hamilton

At this very moment I'm behind on a compilation that Slave Labor is doing for Free Comic Book Day. ~ Jhonen Vasquez