Harriet Tubman Quotes

There is often no greater obstacle to freedom than the assumption that it has already been attained.

The people of Somalia just do not have a voice. They are to me the most forgotten people in the world.

I didn't know I was a slave until I found out I couldn't do the things I wanted.

In jail I was just like everybody else, I was sitting there praying, feeling caged.

We hate our squalor.

Poverty is often off the beaten track. It always has been.

Desire, ignorance, and inequality—this is the trinity of bondage.

Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime.

Whenever there are enclosing walls, there are abuses behind them.

I had a very hard life in Kazakhstan.

It's pretty hard to have faith when everybody is trying to lock you up.

The freedom of birds is an insult to me.

No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.

In my books, there are a lot of people stuck in rooms. Or, conversely, out in the wide open. It seems that, in a funny way, when people are cooped up in rooms they are freer than when they are wandering about in the world.

Freedom is too enormous to be slipped under a closet door.

Liberty is a dearly bought commodity and prisons are factories where it is manufactured.

I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

I get out, I get out of all your boxes. I get out, you can't hold me in these chains. I'll get out. Father free me from this bondage. Knowin' my condition is the reason I must change

If you want to destroy something in this life, be it an acne, a blemish or the human soul, all you need to do is to surround it with thick walls. It will dry up inside.

There is one kind of prison where the man is behind bars, and everything that he desires is outside; and there is another kind where the things are behind the bars, and the man is outside.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

Captivity is the greatest of all evils that can befall one.

I do not wish to remove from my present prison to a prison a little larger. I wish to break all prisons.

I think if you keep the box closed long enough you do kill the cat, actually.

Poetry and prison have always been neighbors.