Top 181 Quotes & Sayings by Susan B. Anthony - Page 3

Not one of our national officers ever has had a dollar of salary. I retire on full pay!

Every generation of converts threshes over the same old straw.

Better lose me than lose a state.

In your ordered verdict of guilty, you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, my civil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually, but all of my sex, are, by your honor's verdict, doomed to political subjection under this, so-called, form of government.

It used to be said in antislavery days that a people who would tacitly consent to the enslavement of 4,000,000 human beings were incapable of being just to each other, and I believe this same rule holds with regard to the injustice practiced by men towards women. So long as all men conspire to rob women of the citizen's right to perfect equality in all the privileges and immunities of our so-called "free" government, we can not expect these same men to be capable of perfect justice to each other.

Another writer asserts that the tyranny of man over woman has its roots, after all, in his nobler feelings; his love, his chivalry, and his desire to protect woman in the barbarous periods of pillage, lust, and war. But wherever the roots may be traced, the results at this hour are equally disastrous to woman. Her best interests and happiness do not seem to have been consulted in the arrangements made for her protection. She has been bought and sold, caressed and crucified at the will and pleasure of her master.

To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom.

When a man says to me, 'Let us work together in the great cause you have undertaken, and let me be your companion and aid, for I admire you more than I have ever admired any other woman,' then I shall say, 'I am yours truly'; but he must ask me to be his equal, not his slave.

I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have giventhemselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.

Governments never do any great good things from mere principle, from mere love of justice ... You expect too much of human nature when you expect that.

No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence.

If any proof were needed of the progress of the cause for which I have worked, it is here tonight. The presence on the stage of these college women, and in the audience of all those college girls who will some day be the nation's greatest strength, will tell their own story to the world.

We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman's own thoughts, and not as woman thinks a man wants her to think and write.

... even I am growing accustomed to slavery; so much so that I cease to think of its accursed influence and calmly eat from the hands of the bondman without being mindful that he is such. O, Slavery, hateful thing that thou art thus to blunt the keen edge of conscience!

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons?

There is not the woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for any one who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you...increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of educating our future presidents, senators and congressmen.

So long as State constitutions say that all may vote when twenty-one, save idiots, lunatics, convicts and women, you are brought down politically to the level of those others disfranchised.

A woman growing up under American ideas of liberty in government and religion, having never blushed behind a Turkish mask, nor pressed her feet in Chinese shoes, cannot brook any disabilities based on sex alone, without a deep feeling of antagonism with the power that creates it.

It is cruel for you to leave your daughter, so full of hope and resolve, to suffer the humiliations of disfranchisement she already feels so keenly, and which she will find more and more galling as she grows into the stronger and grander woman she is sure to be. If it were your son who for any cause was denied his right to have his opinion counted, you would compass sea and land to lift the ban from him.

Current creation has exiled the turning wheel, and the same law of advancement makes the lady of today an alternate lady from her grandma.

What you should say to outsiders is that a Christian has neither more nor less rights in our Association than an atheist. When our platform becomes too narrow for people of all creeds and of no creeds, I myself shall not stand upon it.

Gentlemen, no one objects to the husband being the head of the wife as Christ was the head of the church--to crucify himself; whatwe object to is his crucifying his wife.

Many abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights.

Those of you who have the talent to do honor to poor womanhood, have all given yourself over to baby-making. . .

Mr. Roosevelt, this is my principal request--it is almost the last request I shall ever make of anybody. Before you leave the presidential chair, recommend Congress to submit to the Legislatures a Constitutional Amendment which will enfranchise women, and thus take your place in history with Lincoln, the great emancipator. I beg of you not to close your term of office without doing this.

[Asked if American women would ever win full suffrage:] Assuredly. I firmly believed at one time that I should live to see that day. I have never for one moment lost faith. It will come but I shall not see itit is inevitable.

... even if the right to vote brought to women no better work, no better pay, no better conditions in any way, she should have itfor her own self-respect and to compel man's respect for her.

Of all my prosecutorsnot one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer.

Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.

Of all the old prejudices that cling to the hem of the woman's garments and persistently impede her progress, none holds faster than this. The idea that she owes service to a man instead of to herself, and that it is her highest duty to aid his development rather than her own, will be the last to die.

Disfranchisement means inability to make, shape, or control one's own circumstances... . That is exactly the position of women in the world of work today; they cannot choose.

I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder...We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil, and destroy it.

Whichever way I turn, whatever phase of social life presents itself, the same conviction comes: Independent bread alone can redeem woman from her curse of subjection to man.

Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

The anti-suffragist talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is a lot of cant. I have no patience with it. These storms beat on woman just as fiercely as they do on man, and she is not trained to defend herself against them.

If I could only live another century!

... God allows the wheat and the tares to grow up together, andthe tares frequently get the start of the wheat and kill it out. The only difference between the wheat and human beings is that the latter have intellect and ought to combine and pull out the tares, root and branch.

We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of justice--that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessions upon the same terms as to the men--because we shall not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get it; our business is to make the demand.... Ask for the whole loaf and take what you can get.

Had I represented twenty thousand voters in Michigan, that political editor would not have known nor cared whether I was the oldest or the youngest daughter of Methuselah, or whether my bonnet came from the Ark or from Worth's.

... while one-half of the people of the United States are robbed of their inherent right of personal representation in this freestcountry on the face of the globe, it is idle for us to expect that the men who thus rob women will not rob each other as individuals, corporations and Government.

Sentiment never was and never can be a guarantee for justice.

I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper - The Revolution - four years ago, the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government... And I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim, that "Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God."

When will the men do something besides extend congratulations? I would rather have President Roosevelt say one word to Congress infavor of amending the Constitution to give women the suffrage than to praise me endlessly!

It will be the mistake of your life if you go into print in your own defence [sic]. Your denial will reach a new set of people andstart them to talking, while the ones who read the original charges will never see the refutation of them.

Independent bread gives independent morals: - while pecuniary dependence makes moral subserviency; - So get money - get wealth

I can see that "reap" and "deep," "prayers" and "bears," . . . do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.

The fact is, women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize it.

No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.

I have many things to say. My every right, constitutional, civil, political and judicial has been tramped upon. I have not only had no jury of my peers, but I have had no jury at all.

There have been others also just as true and devoted to the cause--I wish I could name every one--but with such women consecratingtheir lives, failure is impossible!

I think it a much wiser thing to secure for the thousands of mothers in this State the legal control of the children they now have, than to bring others into the world who would not belong to me after they were born.

To be successful a person must attempt but one reform. By urging two, both are injured, as the average mind can grasp and assimilate but one idea at a time.

... we shall never become an immense power in the world until we concentrate all our money and editorial forces upon one great national daily newspaper, so we can sauce back our opponents every day in the year; once a month or once a week is not enough.

If a man's public record be a clear one, if he has kept his pledges before the world, I do not inquire what his private life may have been.

For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the underlying principle of our Government, the right of consent, shall have practical application to the other half of people. Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be heeded.

It has always been thought perfectly womanly to be a scrub- woman in the Legislature and to take care of the spittoons; that is entirely within the charmed circle of woman's sphere; but for women to occupy any of those official seats would be degrading.

The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South.

I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon. (on women's suffrage)

The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.