From Jone Johnson Lewis,
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Escaped slave who led many other slaves to freedom, Harriet Tubman was also an abolitionist, Civil War soldier, and women's rights advocate.

Selected Harriet Tubman Quotations

• I grew up like a neglected weed -- ignorant of liberty, having no experience of it.

• I had reasoned this out in my mind, there was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.

• I had crossed the line. I was free; but there was no one to welcome me to the land of freedom. I was a stranger in a strange land.

• Quakers almost as good as colored.... They call themselves friends and you can trust them every time.

• I never ran my train off the track, and I never lost a passenger.

• We saw the lightning and that was the guns; and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns; and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling; and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.

Quotes About Harriet Tubman

• From Alice Walker: "We will be ourselves and free, or die in the attempt. Harriet Tubman was not our great-grandmother for nothing." Alice Walker, You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down.

• From Frederick Douglass: "The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witness of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism."

• From Frederick Douglass: "Much that you have done would seem improbable to those who do not know you as I know you."

• From William Still, diary entry: "Great fears were entertained for her safety, but she was wholly devoid of personal fear. The idea of being captured by slave-hunters or slave holders, seemed never to enter her mind."

• From Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1859 letter: "Her tales of adventure are beyond anything in fiction and her ingenuity and generalship are extraordinary. I have known her for some time -- the slaves call her Moses."

• From Thomas Wentworth Higginson, 1859 letter: "... a more ordinary specimen of humanity could hardly be found among the most unfortunate-looking farm hands of the South. Yet in point of courage, shrewdness, and disinterested exertions to rescue her fellow-man, she was without equal."

• From Oprah Winfrey: "I am where I am because of the bridges that I crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge. Harriet Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells was a bridge. Madame C. J. Walker was a bridge. Fannie Lou Hamer was a bridge."

Related Resources for Harriet Tubman

• About Harriet Tubman
• Biography: Moses of Her People
• Image: Larger Version

More Women's Quotes:

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About These Quotes

Quote collection assembled by Jone Johnson Lewis. Each quotation page in this collection and the entire collection © Jone Johnson Lewis 1997-2005. This is an informal collection assembled over many years. I regret that I am not be able to provide the original source if it is not listed with the quote.

Citation information:
Jone Johnson Lewis. "Harriet Tubman Quotes." About Women's History. URL: http://womenshistory.about.com/cs/quotes/qu_h_tubman.htm . Date accessed: (today). (More on how to cite online sources including this page)