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

...for twenty years or more, nothing but loving words, and gentle moralities, and motherly loving kindness, had come from that chair; — headaches and heartaches innumerable had been cured there, — difficulties spritual and temporal solved there, — all by one good, loving woman, God bless her!

What makes saintliness in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the circle of the heroic.

Whoever visits some estates there, and witnesses the good-humored indulgence of some masters and mistresses, and the affectionate loyalty of some slaves, might be tempted to dream the oft-fabled poetic legend of a patriarchal institution, and all that; but over and above the scene there broods a portentous shadow — the shadow of law. So long as the law considers all these human beings, with beating hearts and living affections, only as so many things belonging to a master — so long as the failure, or misfortune, or imprudence, or death of the kindest owner, may cause them any day to exchange a life of kind protection and indulgence for one of hopeless misery and toil — so long it is impossible to make anything beautiful or desirable in the best regulated administration of slavery.