Harriet Tubman Quotes

Slavery and freedom cannot exist together.

Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Inhale our air, that moment they are free! They touch our country, and their shackles fall!

Every slave is a stolen man.

To some extent I liken slavery to death.

[Describing slavery:] ... a cruel war against human nature itself.

Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it, by being a slave himself.

… it would be perfectly right for anyone to interfere with you so far as to free those you wilfully and wickedly hold in bondage.

I think slavery is the next thing to hell. If a person would send another into bondage, he would, it appears to me, be bad enough to send him into hell if he could.

The slavery at Bufford's was too fresh in my recollection to let me care to bind myself again. From the time that I took my nose off that lithographic stone, I have had no master, and never shall have any.

The very idea that human beings are held in bondage is sickening.

Slavery is perhaps the greatest affront to the fundamental principle of individual liberty.

Should I be worried about being a slave and being returned to slavery? Because certain things happened in the Constitution that had to change.

Slavery can never be abolished.

Death is better than slavery.

Life without liberty is like a body without spirit.

No man may make another free.

I am amazed at the facility with which some men follow in the wake of slavery.

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.

When one person is enslaved, we're all enslaved.

A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.

The state of slavery is in its own nature bad.

Abolitionists believe that, as all men are born free, so all who are now held as slaves in this country were born free, and that they are slaves now is the sin, not of those who introduced the race into this country, but of those, and those alone, who now hold them and have held them in slavery from their birth.

Yet thousands of slaves throughout the southern states are thus handed over by the masters who own them to masters who do not; and it does not require much demonstration to prove that their estate is not always the more gracious.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

This and many others only confirmed me in the opinion, planted when I saw the sale of Martha Ann, and growing steadily thereafter, that slavery was an accursed business, and that the sooner my people were relieved of it, the better.