Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example.
I shall not grow conservative with age.
So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves.
The right is ours. Have it we must. Use it we will.
The best protection any woman can have... is courage.
Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.
The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty.
Human beings lose their logic in their vindictiveness.
The queens in history compare favorably with the kings.
The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.
It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.
Woman's discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.
The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.
The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.
I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well.
To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.
The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.
To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
Social science affirms that a woman's place in society marks the level of civilization.
Words cannot describe the indignation a proud woman feels for her sex in disfranchisement.
Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.
The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.
The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.
Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.
The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.
The God of justice is with us, and our word, our work - our prayer for freedom will not, cannot be in vain.
The more I think on the present condition of woman, the more am I oppressed with the reality of their degradation.
The greatest block today in the way of woman's emancipation is the church, the canon law, the Bible and the priesthood.
There would be more sense in insisting on man's limitations because he cannot be a mother than on a woman's because she can be.
The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.
Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.
Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.
Women of all classes are awakening to the necessity of self-support, but few are willing to do the ordinary useful work for which they are fitted.
I thought that the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous. So I decided to study Greek and learn to manage a horse.
To live for a principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are to be lifted up to be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.
We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.
We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.
Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe -the open sesame to every soul.
The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body... is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.
Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony and beauty may reign supreme.
So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness--united, such strength of self-association that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable.
To have drunkards, idiots, horse-racing, rumselling rowdies, ignorant foreigners, and silly boys fully recognized, while we ourselves are thrust out from all the rights that belong to citizens, it is too grossly insulting to... be longer quietly submitted to.
I can truly say, after an experience of seventy years, that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed. . . . The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
These teachings in regard to woman so faithfully reflect the provisions of the canon law that it is fair to infer that their inspiration came from the same source, written by men, translated by men, revised by men. If the Bible is to be placed in the hands of our children, read in our schools, taught in our theological seminaries, proclaimed as God's law in our temples of worship, let us by all means call a council of women in New York, and give it one more revision from the woman's standpoint.
Let the girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining, torturing, perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another.
