Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Susan B. Anthony

Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.

I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.

Here, in this very first paragraph of the Declaration, is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can 'the consent of the governed' be given if the right to vote be denied?

Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!

I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.

I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of brutal masters.

Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities.

Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

The principle of self-government cannot be violated with impunity. The individual's right to it is sacred - regardless of class, caste, race, color, sex or any other accident or incident of birth.

White men have always controlled their wives' wages. Colored men were not able to do so until they themselves became free. Then they owned both their wives and their wages.

No one can doubt that the sufferings of the sober, virtuous woman, in legal subjection to the mastership of a drunken, immoral husband and father over herself and children, not only from physical abuse, but from spiritual shame and humiliation, must be such as the man himself can not possibly comprehend.

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

The worst enemy women have is in the pulpit.

Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.

An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

If women will not accept marriage with subjection, nor men proffer it without, there is, there can be, no alternative. The women who will not be ruled must live without marriage. And during this transition period... single women make comfortable and attractive homes for themselves.

I have given my life and all I am to it, and now I want my last act to be to give it all I have, to the last cent.

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people - women as well as men.

Woman must have a purse of her own, and how can this be so long as the law denies to the wife all right to both the individual and the joint earnings?

To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.

No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party who ignores her sex.

I don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.

The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball - the further I am rolled the more I gain.

You would better educate ten women into the practice of liberal principles than to organize a thousand on a platform of intolerance and bigotry.

The work of woman is not to lessen the severity or the certainty of the penalty for the violation of the moral law, but to prevent this violation by the removal of the causes which lead to it.

I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.

We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights. Before governments were organized, no one denies that each individual possessed the right to protect his own life, liberty and property.

Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.

Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.

The day may be approaching when the whole world will recognize woman as the equal of man.

Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.

Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.

I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.

Whoever controls work and wages, controls morals.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations... can never effect a reform.

Failure is impossible.

It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government: the ballot.

Independence is happiness.

What you should do is to say to outsiders that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our association than an atheist.

It is poor rule that won't work more ways than one.

Wherever, on the face of the globe or on the page of history, you show me a disfranchised class, I will show you a degraded class of labor.

There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.

She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.

For every betrayed woman, there is always the betrayer, man.

Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people? We draw out from other people our own thought. If, when you go out to organize, you go with a broad spirit, you will create and call out breadth and toleration. You had better organize one woman on a broad platform than 10,000 on a narrow platform of intolerance and bigotry.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.

I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men's rights are nothing more. Women's rights are nothing less.

Suffrage is the pivotal right.

The Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, the constitutions of the several states, and the organic laws of the territories all alike propose to protect the people in the exercise of their God-given rights. Not one of them pretends to bestow rights.

Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less

We shall some day be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.

Wherever women gather together failure is impossible.