Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

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 best protection any woman can have... is courage.

A government is just only when the whole people share equally in its protection and advantages.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world. I don't believe that any man ever talked with god. The bible was written by man out of his love of domination.

The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty.

The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.

When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.

Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.

The strongest reason why we ask for woman a voice in the government under which she lives; in the religion she is asked to believe; equality in social life, where she is the chief factor; a place in the trades and professions, where she may earn her bread, is because of her birthright to self-sovereignty; because, as an individual, she must rely on herself.

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.

A man in love will jump to pick up a glove or a bouquet for a silly girl of sixteen, whilst at home he will permit his aged mother to carry pails of water and armfuls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty-pound baby, hour after hour, without ever offe

So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves.

They who say that women do not desire the right of suffrage, that they prefer masculine domination to self-government, falsify every page of history, every fact in human experience. It has taken the whole power of the civil and canon law to hold woman in the subordinate position which it is said she willingly accepts.

Progress is the victory of a new thought over old superstitions.

Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.

Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning.

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.

Every man who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed against her.

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.

In her present ignorance, woman's religion, instead of making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great principles ofright and justice, has made her bondage but more certain and lasting, her degradation more hopeless and complete.

While women were tortured, drowned and burned by the thousands, scarce one wizard to a hundred was ever condemned ... The same distinction of sex appears in our own day. One code of morals for men, another for women.

Words cannot describe the indignation a proud woman feels for her sex in disfranchisement.

The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.

The prolonged slavery of woman is the darkest page in human history.

When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*

Women are afraid. It is unpopular to question the bible. They are creatures of tradition. They fear to question their position in the testament, as they feared to advocate suffrage fifty years ago. Now they are quarreling as to which were among the first to advocate it. You see they are not used to abuse as I am. In Albany, fifty years ago, when I went before the legislature to plead for a married woman's right to her own property, the women whom I met in society crossed the street rather than speak to me.

Men as a general rule have very little reverence for trees.

Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.

You who have read the history of nations, from Moses down to our last election, where have you ever seen one class looking after the interests of another?

[On women's role in the home:] Every wife, mother and housekeeper feels at present that there is some screw loose in the household situation.

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.

To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.

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.

To develop our real selves, we need time alone for thought and meditation. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry.

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.

The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.

Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.

Social science affirms that a woman's place in society marks the level of civilization.

Woman's discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.

There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.

A woman will always be dependent until she holds a purse of her own.

When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves the earth.

The bible teaches that woman brought sin and death into the world, that she precipitated the fall of the race, that she was arraigned before the judgment seat of Heaven, tried, condemned and sentenced. Marriage for her was to be a condition of bondage, maternity a period of suffering and anguish, and in silence and subjection, she was to play the role of a dependent on man's bounty for all her material wants, and for all the information she might desire...Here is the bible position of woman briefly summed up.

Religious superstitions more than all other influences put together cripple & enslave woman, but so long as women themselves do not see it & hug their chains, we have a great educational work to do.

Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood, the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked God's blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots.

To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.