Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveQuote

There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty, or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other; for no man should take me alive.

Harriet Tubman, in Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People, 1886

History

The story behind the card

Harriet Tubman was born into slavery in Maryland and escaped north to Philadelphia in 1849. She told the writer Sarah H. Bradford that she had thought it through before she ran: she would be free or die, and would fight rather than be taken back. Bradford first told her story in Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (1869), partly to raise money for her, and reworked it in 1886 as Harriet, the Moses of Her People, the edition quoted here. Tubman went back south about 13 times and led some 70 people to freedom along the Underground Railroad, the secret network of routes and safe houses. In the American Civil War she worked for the Union army as a scout, spy and nurse.

Türkçe oku
İki şeyden birine hakkım vardı: özgürlüğe ya da ölüme. Birine kavuşamazsam öbürünü alacaktım; çünkü hiç kimse beni sağ ele geçiremeyecekti.
Harriet Tubman, aktaran Sarah H. Bradford, Harriet, the Moses of Her People, 1886

Harriet Tubman, Maryland'de köle olarak doğdu ve 1849'da kaçarak kuzeydeki Philadelphia'ya ulaştı. Yazar Sarah H. Bradford'a, yola çıkmadan önce kararını verdiğini anlatmıştı: Ya özgür olacak ya ölecekti; geri götürülmektense sonuna kadar direnecekti. Bradford onun hayatını önce 1869'da, kısmen Tubman'a para toplamak için Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman adıyla yayımladı; 1886'da da buradaki sözlerin alındığı Harriet, the Moses of Her People adıyla yeniden yazdı. Tubman güneye yaklaşık 13 kez geri döndü ve gizli yollarla güvenli evlerden oluşan Yeraltı Demiryolu ağı üzerinden 70 kadar kişiyi özgürlüğe kavuşturdu. Amerikan İç Savaşı'nda Birlik ordusu için keşif görevlisi, casus ve hemşire olarak çalıştı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Harriet Tubman
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

DriveHistory

Harland Sanders was in his early sixties when the first Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise opened, in Utah in 1952. At 65, after a new highway took the traffic away from his roadside café in Corbin, Kentucky, he sold it and took to the road, selling his recipe to other restaurants.

Sanders had been frying chicken for travellers at his café and motel on a busy road in Corbin since the 1930s. He was never an army officer: in 1935 the governor of Kentucky made him an honorary Kentucky Colonel. His first franchisee was Pete Harman, who ran a large restaurant in South Salt Lake, and it was a sign painter hired by Harman who came up with the name Kentucky Fried Chicken. Franchisees paid Sanders four cents for every chicken sold. When the café closed, he lived on his savings and a $105 monthly Social Security pension while he drove from town to town. By 1963 there were more than 600 KFC restaurants. The next year, aged 73, he sold the company for $2 million and stayed on as its white-suited public face. A popular story says he was turned down 1,009 times; no reliable record confirms that number.

KFC and The New YorkerRead card
DrivePhilosophy

When Alexander the Great met the philosopher Diogenes of Sinope (today's Sinop in Turkey) in Corinth and asked what he could do for him, Diogenes is said to have replied: 'Stand a little out of my sun.'

Diogenes (about 412–323 BC) left Sinope, a Greek city on the Black Sea coast, after a scandal over debased coins, and settled in Athens. He lived by begging, slept in a large storage jar and walked through the market in daylight with a lit lamp, saying he was looking for a human being. He was the best-known Cynic, from the Greek word for 'dog-like', a name that mocked his shameless way of life and that he wore with pride. The meeting with Alexander is told by Plutarch and by Diogenes Laërtius, who wrote about the lives of the philosophers, both centuries later, so its details may have been polished. Plutarch adds that Alexander said: if I were not Alexander, I would be Diogenes. Sinop honours him with a statue, put up in 2006, showing him with his lamp and a dog.

Philosophy historyRead card
DrivePhilosophy

Marcus Aurelius, Roman emperor from AD 161 to 180, filled private notebooks with Stoic reflections, written in Greek and never meant for publication. We know them today as the Meditations.

Stoicism was a Greek school of philosophy that taught people to focus on what is in their power, their own judgements and actions, and to accept calmly what is not. Marcus had studied it since his youth. He wrote much of the Meditations in the 170s, while leading campaigns against Germanic tribes on the Danube frontier; notes in the text place the first book in the land of the Quadi and the second at Carnuntum, a Roman fort in today's Austria. He gave the work no title. The Greek manuscripts call it Ta eis heauton, “To himself”. The notes survived in Byzantine copies and were first printed in Zurich in 1558 or 1559, and they have since become one of the most widely read books of philosophy.

Philosophy historyRead card
DriveHistory

Let us strive on to finish the work we are in.

Lincoln spoke these words on 4 March 1865, as his second term began, with the Civil War nearly won. The speech was about 700 words. Instead of celebrating, he named slavery as the cause of the war, and closed with a call to act 'with malice toward none, with charity for all': to finish the work, bind up the nation's wounds and seek a just and lasting peace. About six weeks later he was shot at Ford's Theatre. The speech is carved into a wall of the Lincoln Memorial.

Abraham LincolnRead card
DriveHistory

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.

Douglass spoke these words in August 1857 at Canandaigua, New York, marking the day in 1834 when Britain's law abolishing slavery in its Caribbean colonies took effect. In the United States slavery was still legal, and that March the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision had ruled that Black Americans could not be citizens. He added that the limits of tyrants are set by the endurance of those they oppress. Born into slavery in Maryland around 1818, he escaped in 1838 and became the best-known anti-slavery speaker of his time.

Frederick DouglassRead card
Next card in the archivePeriodical cicadas in eastern North America spend 13 or 17 years underground, then emerge together in their millions for a few weeks of song and mating.Read next →