“Religion without humanity is very poor human stuff.”

The Spirit calls me, and I must go.

If women want any rights more than they’s got, why don’t they just take them, and not be talking about it?

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.

And ar’n’t I a woman?

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.

Then I will speak upon the ashes.

It is the mind that makes the body.

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

Truth is powerful and it prevails.

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.

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.

The out-of-work actor wears out more than shoe leather. The very sensibilities that make him an artist are shattered by the disregard he is shown as a human being.

There is a certain ecstasy in wanting things you can’t get.

There is no difference between the worry of a human mother and an animal mother for their offspring. A mother’s love does not derive from the intellect but from the emotions, in animals just as in humans.

Anybody wherever I’ve ever been in my life, one thing they can always say good or bad, I was always doing music and I always wanted to be a rapper.

Don’t ever give anybody your best advice, because they’re not going to follow it.

There is nothing to make you like other human beings so much as doing things for them.

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us and we drown.

The imagination is not a state: it is the human existence itself.