Potent Quotable (December 2025)
“You seem to wonder; but if you will get me fairly at it, I’ll make a clean breast of it. This curse business, accursed of God and man, what is it? Strip it of all its ornament, run it down to the root and nucleus of the whole, and what is it? Why, because my brother Quashy is ignorant and weak, and I am intelligent and strong - because I know how, can do it, -therefore, I may steal all he has, keep it, and give him only such and so much as it suits my fancy. Whatever is too hard, too dirty, too disagreeable, for me, I may set Quashy to doing. Because I don’t like work, Quashy shall work. Because the sun burns me, Quashy shall stay in the sun. Quashy shall earn the money, and I will spend it. Quashy shall lie down in every puddle, that I may walk over dry-shod. Quashy shall do my will, and not his, all the days of his mortal life, and have such chance of getting to heaven, at last, as I find convenient. This I take to be about what slavery is. I defy anybody on earth to read our slave-code, as it stands in our law-books, and make anything else of it. Talks of the abuses of slavery! Humbug! The thing itself is the essence of all abuse! And the only reason why the land don’t sink under it, like Sodom and Gomorrah, is because it is used in a way infinitely better than it is. For pity’s sake, for shame’s sake, because we are men born of women, and not savage beasts, many of us do not, and dare not, -we would scorn to use the full power which our savage laws put into our hands. And he who goes furthest, and does the worst, only uses within the limits the power that the law gives him.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe
“The dark places of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe
“IS GOD HERE? Ah, how is it possible for the untaught heart to keep its faith, unswerving in the face of dire misrule, and palpable, unrebuked injustice? In that simple heart waged a fierce conflict: the crushing sense of wrong, the foreshadowing of a whole life of future misery, the wreck of all past hopes, mournfully tossing in the soul’s sight, like dead corpses of wife, and child, and friend, rising from the dark wave, and surging in the face of the half-drowned mariner!” -Harriet Beecher Stowe
“It is the right of a man to be a man, and not a brute; the right to all the wife of his bosom his wife, and to protect her from lawless violence, the right to protect and educate his child; the right to have a home of his own, a religion of his own, a character of his one, unsubject to the will of another.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe
“The longest way must have its close, -the gloomiest night will wear on to a morning. An eternal, inexorable lapse of moments in every hurrying the day of the evil to an eternal night, and the night of the just to an eternal day. We have walked with our humble friend thus far in the valley of slavery; first through flowery fields of ease and indulgence, then through heart-breaking separations from all that man holds dear. Again, we have waited with him in a sunny island, where generous hands concealed his chains with flowers; and lastly, we have followed him when the last ray of earthly hope went out in night, and seen how, in the blackness of earthly darkness, the firmament of the unseen has blazed with stars of new and significant lustre.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe
“How can it be otherwise, when a system prevails which whirls families and scatters their members, as the wind whirls and scatters the leaves of autumn? These shores of refuge, like the eternal shore, often unite again, in glad communion, hearts that for long years have mourned each other as lost. And affecting beyond expression is the earnestness with which every new arrival among them is met, if, perchance, it may bring tidings of mother, sister, child, or wife, still lost to view in the shadows of slavery.” -Harriet Beecher Stowe
Be good to each other,
Nathan
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