Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by Jane Swisshelm

If I wrote at all, I must throw myself headlong into the great political maelstrom, and would of course be swallowed up like a fishing-boat in the great Norway horror which decorated our school geographies; for no woman had ever done such a thing, and I could never again hold up my head under the burden of shame and disgrace which would be heaped upon me. But what matter? I had no children to dishonor; all save one who had ever loved me were dead, and she no longer needed me, and if the Lord wanted some one to throw into that gulf, no one could be better spared than I.

A woman with her two children was captured on the steps of the capitol building, whither she had fled for protection, and this, too, while the stars and stripes floated over it.

Dying is not difficult, yielding is impossible.

Girls, do not scrub and cook and scour until you have no time left to plant a tree, or vine or flower.

So, instead of spending my strength quarreling with the hand, I would strike for the heart of that great tyranny.

It is an old adage, "All is fair in love as in war," but I thought not of general laws, and only felt a private grievance.

I must be the mate of the man I had chosen; and if he would not come to my level, I must go to his.

It was quite an insignificant looking sheet, but no sooner did the American eagle catch sight of it, than he swooned and fell off his perch.

Had I made capital on my prettiness, I should have closed the doors of public employment to women for many a year, by the very means which now makes them weak, underpaid competitors in the great workshop of the world.

I put away my brushes; resolutely crucified my divine gift, and while it hung writhing on the cross, spent my best years and powers cooking cabbage. "A servant of servants shall she be," must have been spoken of women, not Negroes.

The diagnosis of drunkenness was that it was a disease for which the patient was in no way responsible, that it was created by existing saloons, and non-existing bright hearths, smiling wives, pretty caps and aprons. The cure was the patent nostrum of pledge-signing, a lying-made-easy invention, which like calomel, seldom had any permanent effect on the disease for which it was given, and never failed to produce another and a worse. Here the care created an epidemic of forgery, falsehood and perjury.

I had gone into the hospital with the stupid notion that its primary object was the care and comfort of the sick and wounded. It was long after that I learned that a vast majority of all benevolent institutions are gotten up to gratify the aesthetic tastes of the public; exhibit the wealth and generosity of the founders, and furnish places for officers. The beneficiaries of the institutions are simply an apology for their existence, and having furnished that apology, the less said about them the better.

I cannot tell what I am as much afraid of, as a woman who invariably washes on Monday. It is a kind of key to character; and if her mouth is not puckered and her brow wrinkled, they will be, unless she repents.

Abolitionists were men of sharp angles. Organizing them was like binding crooked sticks in a bundle.

As our boys and men are all expecting to be Presidents, so our girls and women must all hold themselves in readiness to preside inthe White House; and in no city in the world can honest industry be more at a discount than in this capital of the government of the people.

When a woman starts out in the world on a mission, secular or religious, she should leave her feminine charms at home.

We have not the slightest idea that women are made of such light material that the breath of any fool or knave may blow them on the rocks of ruin.

Women should not weaken their cause by impracticable demands. Make no claim which could not be won in a reasonable time. Take onestep at a time, get a good foothold in it and advance carefully.

Let the erring sisters depart in peace; the idea of getting up a civil war to compel the weaker States to remain in the Union appears to us horrible to the last degree.

It appears to be a matter of national pride that the President is to have more mud, and blacker mud, and filthier mud in front ofhis door than any other man can afford.