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.
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?
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.
The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.
Truth is powerful and it prevails.
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!
The Spirit calls me, and I must go.
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.
What we give to the poor, we lend to the Lord.
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.
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.
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?
We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.
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?
Truth burns up error.
Christ came from God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.
And ar’n’t I a woman?
Where there is so much racket, there must be something out of kilter.
Then I will speak upon the ashes.
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.
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.