Lydia Maria Child quotes

Lydia Maria Child was an American abolitionist, novelist, and journalist renowned for her advocacy of social reform. Her writings addressed issues such as slavery, women's rights, and Native American rights. She became a leading voice for justice and equality in nineteenth-century America. Here are 45 of her quotes:

Over the river, and through the wood, To grandfather's house we go; The horse knows the way, To carry the sleigh, Through the white and drifted snow.

Lydia Maria Child

The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.

Lydia Maria Child

I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.

Lydia Maria Child

Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit; and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.

Lydia Maria Child

The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and crimes of humanity, all lie in that one word LOVE. It is the divine vitality that produces and restores life.

Lydia Maria Child

That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.

Lydia Maria Child

Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kind, sunshiny old age.

Lydia Maria Child

Home-that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven, and helps to carry it thither, as on an angel's wings.

Lydia Maria Child

In the first place, an unjust law exists in this Commonwealth, by which marriages between persons of different color is pronounced illegal. I am perfectly aware of the gross ridicule to which I may subject myself by alluding to this particular; but I have lived too long, and observed too much, to be disturbed by the world's mockery.

Lydia Maria Child

They [the slaves] have stabbed themselves for freedom-jumped into the waves for freedom-starved for freedom-fought like very tigers for freedom! But they have been hung, and burned, and shot-and their tyrants have been their historians!

Lydia Maria Child

That man's best works should be such bungling imitations of Nature's infinite perfection, matters not much; but that he should make himself an imitation, this is the fact which Nature moans over, and deprecates beseechingly. Be spontaneous, be truthful, be free, and thus be individuals! is the song she sings through warbling birds, and whispering pines, and roaring waves, and screeching winds.

Lydia Maria Child

In the first place, the government ought not to be invested with power to control the affections, any more than the consciences of citizens. A man has at least as good a right to choose his wife, as he has to choose his religion. His taste may not suit his neighbors; but so long as his deportment is correct, they have no right to interfere with his concerns.

Lydia Maria Child

All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.

Lydia Maria Child

I will work in my own way, according to the light that is in me.

Lydia Maria Child

Genius hath electric power Which earth can never tame, Bright suns may scorch and dark clouds lower, Its flash is still the same.

Lydia Maria Child

Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of the character, though few can decypher even fragments of their meaning.

Lydia Maria Child

England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent mountains of Switzerland.

Lydia Maria Child

Reverence is the highest quality of man's nature; and that individual, or nation, which has it slightly developed, is so far unfortunate. It is a strong spiritual instinct, and seeks to form channels for itself where none exists; thus Americans, in the dearth of other objects to worship, fall to worshipping themselves.

Lydia Maria Child

It is impossible to exaggerate the evil work theology has done in the world.

Lydia Maria Child

Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel's face. Every man deems that he has precisely the trials and temptations which are the hardest of all others for him to bear; but they are so, simply because they are the very ones he most needs.

Lydia Maria Child

The United States is...a warning rather than an example to the world.

Lydia Maria Child

You find yourself refreshed by the presence of cheerful people. Why not make an honest effort to confer that pleasure on others? Half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything gloomy.

Lydia Maria Child