“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?”

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

Truth burns up error.

I am not going to die, I’m going home like a shooting star.

Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

The rich rob the poor and the poor rob one another.

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

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 have done a great deal of work, as much as a man, but did not get so much pay. I used to work in the field and bind grain, keeping up with the cradler; but men doing no more, got twice as much pay. We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.

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.

Children have their rights denied every single day. We want to build a world where every child is in school and learning, safe from harm and able to fulfill their potential, and we know you do too. It’s time to put children back on the agenda.

The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions.

If a mother can kill her own child – what is left for me to kill you and you to kill me – there is nothing between.

History will judge us by the difference we make in the everyday lives of children.

Adults are just obsolete children and the hell with them.

My dream is that all the world’s children have the right to live in a safe, comfortable environment in which their health and education are guaranteed.

A child’s course in life should be determined not by the zip code she’s born in, but by the strength of her work ethic and the scope of her dreams.

No one ever does live happily ever after, but we leave the children to find that out for themselves.