I must sojourn once to the ballot-box before I die. I hear the ballot-box is a beautiful glass globe, so you can see all the votesas they go in. Now, the first time I vote I’ll see if the woman’s vote looks any different from the rest–if it makes any stir or commotion. If it don’t inside, it need not outside.
SOJOURNER TRUTHReligion without humanity is very poor human stuff.
More Sojourner Truth Quotes
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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.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
The Spirit calls me, and I must go.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
It is hard for the old slave holding spirit to die. But die it must.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
Christ came from God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman?
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
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.
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And ar’n’t I a woman?
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
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.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
Christ came from God and a woman. Man had nothing to do with him.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
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.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
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!
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
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.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
Then I will speak upon the ashes.
SOJOURNER TRUTH -
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?
SOJOURNER TRUTH