19th-century Activist Quotes

Nobody insults a colored man or woman in the Tax Receiver's Office, however full it may be.

I am a woman that came from the cotton fields of the South. I was promoted from there to the washtub. Then I was promoted to the cook kitchen, and from there I promoted myself into the business of manufacturing hair goods and preparations.... Everybody told me I was making a mistake by going into this business, but I know how to grow hair as well as I know how to grow cotton.

Madam C. J. Walker

Slavery in America was debasing, but the debasement of the Negro woman was deeper than that of the Negro man. Slavery made her the only woman in all America for whom virtue was not an ornament and a necessity.

Fannie Barrier Williams

If the government had the right to free us she had a right to make some provision for us and since she did not make it soon after Emancipation she ought to make it now.

A man is sometimes lost in the dust of his own raising.

Just so long as all our literature is pervaded with the thought that women are inferior, so long will our sex be held in a low estimate.

Lillie Devereux Blake

The 'survival of the fittest' is beneficently inevitable; the capitalist is powerless against labor, unless the State... steps in, and helps him catch and fleece his victims. The old plea of despotism, that liberty is unsafe, reappears now in the mistaken notion that competition is hostile to labor.

No longer 'neath the weight of years—
No longer merged in hopeless fears—
Is now that good time, long delayed,
When right, not might, shall all pervade.
Drive hence despair—no longer doubt,
Since friends within and foes without
Their might and main conjointly blend
To reach the same great, glorious end—
The sweeping from this favored land
The last foul chain and slavish brand.

James Madison Bell

Slavery tolerates no freedom of the press, no freedom of speech, no freedom of opinion.

Hinton R. Helper

The colored population of the United States have no destiny separate from that of the nation of which they form an integral part. Our destiny is bound up with that of America. Her ship is ours; her pilot ours; her storms ours; her calms are ours. If she breaks upon any rock, we break with her.

James W.C. Pennington

But, to protect men, we must have the power of controlling them. We must first enslave them before we can protect them.

George Fitzhugh

The little waves of Breffny go stumbling through my soul.

Obscenity is not a quality inherent in a book or picture, but is solely and exclusively a contribution of the reading mind, and hence cannot be defined in terms of the qualities of a book or picture.

Theodore Schroeder

The first time you meet Winston you see all his faults and the rest of your life you spend in discovering his virtues.

Of Winston Churchill

Lady Constance Bulwer-Lytton

It has been well said … that there are steps on the way to the summit of Dietetic Reform, and, if only one step be taken, yet that single step will be not without importance and without influence in the world. The step, which leaves for ever behind it the barbarism of slaughtering our fellow-beings, the Mammals and Birds, is, it is superfluous to add, the most important and most influential of all.

Howard Williams (humanitarian)

I wonder that every colored person is not a misanthrope. Surely we have everything to make us hate mankind.

Charlotte Forten Grimké

Then the Sorcerer Science entered, and where e'er he waved his wand Fresh wonders and fresh mysteries rose on every hand.

Frances Power Cobbe

They fought as they revelled, fast, fiery, and true, And, though victors, they left on the field not a few; And they who survived fought and drank as of yore, But the land of their heart's hope they never saw more, For in far, foreign fields, from Dunkirk to Belgrade Lie the soldiers and chiefs of the Irish Brigade.

Thomas Davis (Young Irelander)

And when her biographer says of an Italian woman poet, 'during some years her Muse was intermitted,' we do not wonder at the fact when he casually mentions her ten children.

Anna Garlin Spencer

The actions of a human being, even of fifteen months of age, may not be without significance to a sympathetic eye.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Facts and not merely opinions are what we want. Emotionalism is not a substitute for the truth.

The worst danger of the mystic is as always a quest of spiritual privilege leading to aloofness from the common lot.

Vida Dutton Scudder

Robert Ingersoll was humorist, iconoclast and lover of humanity.
It is said that the difference between man and the lower animals is that man has the ability to laugh.
When you laugh you relax, and when you relax you give freedom to muscles, nerves and brain-cells. Man seldom has use of his reason when his brain is tense. The sense of humor makes a condition where reason can act.
Ingersoll knew that he must make his appeal to man's brain.

Alice Moore Hubbard

Despite our complicated civilization, so called, or perhaps on account of it, we are all of us a mere set of barbarians, who find it less trouble to provide a new, cheap, and shoddy thing than to get the full use and full pleasure out of a finely-made and carefully-chosen old one.

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.

Susan B. Anthony