Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unrepressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

For how imperiously, how coolly, in disregard of all one’s feelings, does the hard, cold, uninteresting course of daily realities move on! Still we must eat, and drink, and sleep, and wake again, - still bargain, buy, sell, ask and answer questions, - pursue, in short, a thousand shadows, though all interest in them be over; the cold, mechanical habit of living remaining, after all vital interest in it has fled.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

For, so inconsistent is human nature, especially in the ideal, that not to undertake a thing at all seems better than to undertake and come short.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Governments derive their just power from the consent of the governed

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Her husband’s suffering and dangers, and the danger of her child, all blended in her mind, with a confused and stunning sense of the risk she was running, in leaving the only home she had ever known, and cutting loose from the protection of a friend whom she loved and revered. Then there was the parting from every familiar object, —the place where she had grown up, the trees under which she had played, the groves where she had walked many an evening in happier days, by the side of her young husband, —everything, as it lay in the clear, frosty starlight, seemed to speak reproachfully to her, and ask her whither could she go from a home like that?

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

He says that there can be no high civilization without enslavement of the masses, either nominal or real. There must, he says, be a lower class, given up to physical toil and confined to an animal nature; and a higher one thereby acquires leisure and wealth for a more expanded intelligence and improvement, and becomes the directing soul of the lower. So he reasons, because, as I said, he is born an aristocrat;—so I don't believe, because I was born a democrat.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

He was as bold as a lion about it, and 'mightily convinced' not only himself, but everybody that heard him;—but then his idea of a fugitive was only an idea of the letters that spell the word, —or at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle, with "Ran away from the subscriber" under it. The magic of the real presence of distress, —the imploring human eye, the frail, trembling human hand, the despairing appeal of helpless agony, —these he had never tried. He had never thought that a fugitive might be a hapless mother, a defenseless child, —like that one which was now wearing his lost boy's little well-known cap; and so, as our poor senator was not stone or steel, —as he was a man, and a downright noble-hearted one, too, —he was, as everybody must see, in a sad case for his patriotism.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

Human nature is above all things lazy.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

If ever you have had a romantic, calculating friendship, - a boundless worship and belief in some hero of your soul, - if ever you have so loved, that all cold prudence, all selfish worldly considerations have gone down like drift-wood before a river flooded with new rain from heaven, so that you even forgot yourself, and were ready to cast your whole being into the chasm of existence, as an offering before the feet of another, and all for nothing, - if you awoke bitterly betrayed and deceived, still give thanks to God that you have had one glimpse of heaven. The door now shut will open again. Rejoice that the noblest capability of your eternal inheritance has been made known to you; treasure it, as the highest honor of your being, that ever you could so feel, -that so divine a guest ever possessed your soul.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

I long to put the experience of fifty years at once into your young lives to give you at once the key to that treasure chamber every gem of which has cost me tears and struggles and prayers but you must work for these inward treasures yourselves.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe