Frances Harper

"If the fifteenth century discovered America to the Old World, the nineteenth is discovering woman to herself."

"So close is the bond between man and woman that you can not raise one without lifting the other. The world can not move without womans sharing in the movement."

"More than the changing of institutions we need the development of a national conscience, and the upbuilding of national character. Men may boast of the aristocracy of blood, may glory in the aristocracy of talent, and be proud of the aristocracy of wealth, but there is one aristocracy which must ever outrank them all, and that is the aristocracy of character"

"In coming into her political estate woman will find a mass of illiteracy to be dispelled. If knowledge is power, ignorance is also power."

"A wrong done to the weak should be an insult to the strong"

"power without righteousness is one of the most dangerous forces in the world"

"I feel I am something of a novice upon this platform. Born of a race whose inheritance has been outrage and wrong, most of my life had been spent in battling against those wrongs."

"Great evils stare us in the face that need to be throttled by the combined power of an upright manhood and an enlightened womanhood; and I know that no nation can gain its full measure of enlightenment and happiness if one-half of it is free and the other half is fettered."

"I tried to keep my children together. But my husband died in debt; and before he had been in his grave three months, the administrator had swept the very milk crocks and wash tubs from my hands. I was a farmers wife and made butter for the Columbus market; but what could I do, when they had swept all away?"

"Had I died instead of my husband, how different would have been the result! By this time he would have had another wife, it is likely; and no administrator would have gone into his house, broken up his home, and sold his bed, and taken away his means of support."

"You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members. At the South, the legislation of the country was in behalf of the rich slaveholders, while the poor white man was neglected."

"I felt the fight in me; but I dont want to have to fight all the time."