19th-century Activist Quotes

The starlight of heaven above us shall quiver
As our souls flow in one down eternity's river.

Thomas Osborne Davis

I wanted each woman to be a rebellious Vashti, not an Esther.

Margaret Sanger

The only limit to the oppression of government is the power with which the people show themselves capable of opposing it.

Errico Malatesta

Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self- sovereignty.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

If it were proved to me that in making war, my ideal had a chance of being realized, I would still say "No" to war. For one does not create human society on mounds of corpses.

When we arrived in London, my sadness at leaving Paris was turned into despair. After my long stay in the French capital, huge, ponderous, massive London seemed to me as ugly a thing as man could contrive to make.

James Weldon Johnson

Always try to associate with people from whom you can learn something. All the knowledge that you want is in the world, and all you have to do is go and seek it.

The man of meditation is the man who wastes no time, scatters no energy, misses no opportunity.

Only those who would be called upon to risk their lives for their country should have the privilege of voting to determine whether the nation should go to war.

Freedom is the very essence of life, the impelling force in all intellectual and social development, the creator of every new outlook for the future of mankind. The liberation of man from economic exploitation and from intellectual and political oppression, which finds its finest expression in the world-philosophy of Anarchism, is the first prerequisite for the evolution of a higher social culture and a new humanity.

The civilized man is a larger mind but a more imperfect nature than the savage.

Margaret Fuller

Ballet-girls have a bad reputation, which is in most cases well deserved

Humor is a kind of emotional chaos told about calmly and quietly in retrospect.There is always a laugh in the utterly familiar.

A nation to be strong, must be united; to be united, must be equal in condition; to be equal in condition, must be similar inhabits and feeling; to be similar in habits and feeling, must be raised in national institutions as the children of a common family, and citizens of a common country.

I had a vision—and I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams—and I heard a voice saying, "Such is your luck, such you are called to see, and let it come rough or smooth you must surely bare [sic] it."

If there be no right of rebellion against a state of things that no savage tribe would endure without resistance, then I am sure that it is better for men to fight and die without right than to live in such a state of right as this.

It will not do to say that it is out of woman's sphere to assist in making laws, for if that were so, then it should be also out of her sphere to submit to them.

Oh, Mama was a smart woman. It takes a smart woman to fall in love with a good man.

Sarah Louise Delany

Surely nowhere in the world do oppression and persecution based solely on the color of the skin appear more hateful and hideous than in the capital of the United States, because the chasm between the principles upon which the Government was founded, in which it still professes to believe, and those which are daily practiced under the protection of the flag, yawns so wide and deep.

Mary Church Terrell

Humanity... is never stationary. Its progressive march leads it to equality. Its regressive march goes back through every stage of privilege to human slavery, the final word of the right to property.

Louis Auguste Blanqui

The influences that have lifted the race to a higher moral level are education, freedom, leisure, the humanizing tendency of a better-supplied and more interesting life. In a word, science and liberalism... have accomplished the very things for which religion claims the credit.

E. Haldeman-Julius

I want a change, and a radical change. I want a change from an acquisitive society to a functional society, from a society of go-getters to a society of go-givers.

The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.

... for destroying the harmony in the villages by interfering on behalf of the peasants and betraying the money lender.

Bal Gangadhar Tilak

While a man is stringing a harp, he tries the strings, not for music, but for construction. When it is finished it shall be played for melodies. God is fashioning the human heart for future joy. He only sounds a string here and there to see how far His work has progressed.

Henry Ward Beecher