Angelina Grimke Quotes

I recognize no rights but human rights - I know nothing of men's rights and women's rights.

I want to be identified with the negro; until he gets his rights, we shall never have ours.

One who is a slaveholder at heart never recognizes a human being in a slave.

Slavery always has, and always will produce insurrections wherever it exists, because it is a violation of the natural order of things.

Women ought to feel a peculiar sympathy in the colored man's wrong, for, like him, she has been accused of mental inferiority, and denied the privileges of a liberal education.

...I believe it is woman's right to have a voice in all the laws and regulations by which she is to be governed; whether in Churchor State; and that the present arrangements of society, on these points, are a violation of human rights, a rank usurpation of power, a violent seizure and confiscation of what is sacredly and inalienably hers--and thus inflicting upon woman outrageous wrongs, working mischief incalculable in the social circle, and in its influence on the world producing only evil, and that continually.

I recognize no rights but human rights.

The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the anti-slavery cause to be ... the school in which human rights are more fully investigated and better understood and taught than in any other.

We know it matters not what we have been but this and always this: what we shall be.

It is through the tongue, the pen, and the press that truth is principally propagated.

Measure her rights and duties by the unerring standard of moral being… and then the truth will be self-evident, that whatever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do. I recognize no rights but human rights – I know nothing of men’s rights and women’s rights; for in Christ Jesus, there is neither male nor female. It is my solemn conviction, that, until this principle of equality is recognised and embodied in practice, the Church can do nothing effectual for the permanent reformation of the world.

The nation is in a death-struggle. It must either become one vast slaveocracy of petty tyrants, or wholly the land of the free.

If a law commands me to sin I will break it; if it calls me to suffer, I will let it take its course unresistingly.

The doctrine of blind obedience and unqualified submission to any human power, whether civil or ecclesiastical, is the doctrine of despotism.

We Abolition Women are turning the world upside down.

I trust the time is coming, when the occupation of an instructor to children will be deemed the most honorable of human employment.

The denial of our duty to act in this case is a denial of our right to act; and if we have no right to act, then may we well be termed the white slaves of the North, for like our brethren in bonds, we must seal our lips in silence and despair.

I have not placed reading before praying because I regard it more important, but because, in order to pray aright, we must understand what we are praying for.

I am a mystery to myself.

My country is bleeding, my people are perishing around me. But I feel as a South Carolinian, I am bound to tell the North, go on!go on! Never falter, never abandon the principles which you have adopted.

Human beings have rights, because they are moral beings: the rights of all men grow out of their moral nature; and as all men havethe same moral nature, they have essentially the same rights. These rights may be wrested from the slave, but they cannot be alienated: his title to himself is as perfect now, as is that of Lyman Beecher: it is stamped on his moral being, and is, like it, imperishable.

What man or woman of common sense now doubts the intellectual capacity of colored people? Who does not know, that with all our efforts as a nation to crush and annihilate the mind of this portion of our race, we have never yet been able to do it

So precious a talent as intellect never was given to be wrapt in a napkin and buried in the earth.

I prize the purity of his character as highly as I do that of hers. As a moral being, whatever it is morally wrong for her to do,it is morally wrong for him to do. The fallacious doctrine of male and female virtues has well nigh ruined all that is morally great and lovely in his character: he has been quite as deep a sufferer by it as woman, though mostly in different respects and by other processes.

The whole land seems aroused to discussion on the province of woman, and I am glad of it. We are willing to bear the brunt of thestorm, if we can only be the means of making a break in that wall of public opinion which lies right in the way of woman's rights, true dignity, honor and usefulness.