Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

137 Sourced Quotes

The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.

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

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Motherhood is the most important of all professions—requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Besides the obstinacy of the nurse, I had the ignorance of the physicians to contend with.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness--united, such strength of self-association that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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.

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

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
In youth our most bitter disappointments, our brightest hopes and ambitions, are known only to ourselves. Even our friendship and love we never fully share with another; there is something of every passion, in every situation, we conceal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Such is the nature of the marriage relation that a breach once made cannot be healed, and it is the height of folly to waste one's life in vain efforts to make a binary compound of two diverse elements. What would we think of the chemist who should sit twenty years trying to mix oil and water, and insist upon it that his happiness depended upon the result of the experiment?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Everyone in the full enjoyment of all the blessings of his life, in his normal condition, feels some individual responsibility forthe poverty of others. When the sympathies are not blunted by any false philosophy, one feels reproached by one's own abundance.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Strike the words "white male" from all your constitutions, and then, with fair sailing, let us sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish together.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I never saw so intelligent a man have so much trouble in getting out a connected sentence. Ever since I have known him, he has desired to have a long talk with me, but he never gets started; and yet each time he meets me with renewed zest for the outpouring. It is like getting congealed liquid from a demijohn; you know the jug is large and full, but getting the contents out is the problem.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Fear, coercion, punishment, are the masculine remedies for moral weakness, but statistics show their failure for centuries. Why not change the system and try the education of the moral and intellectual faculties, cheerful surroundings, inspiring influences? Everything in our present system tends to lower the physical vitality, the self-respect, the moral tone, and to harden instead of reforming the criminal.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I have such an intense pride of sex that the triumphs of women in art, literature, oratory, science, or song rouse my enthusiasm as nothing else can.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Resolved, That all laws which prevent women from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of thecompass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
How anyone, in view of the protracted sufferings of the race, can invest the laws of the universe with a tender loving fatherly intelligence, watching, guiding and protecting humanity, is to me amazing.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be "a hand, not a mouth"; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The most fitting monuments this nation can build are schoolhouses and homes for those who do the work of the world. It is no answer to say that they are accustomed to rags and hunger. In this world of plenty every human being has a right to food, clothes, decent shelter, and the rudiments of education.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A woman who occupies the same realm of thought with man, who can explore with him the depths of science, comprehend the steps of progress through the long past and prophesy those of the momentous future, must ever be surprised and aggravated with his assumptions of leadership and superiority, a superiority she never concedes, an authority she utterly repudiates.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
So long as woman labors to second man's endeavors and exalt his sex above her own, her virtues pass unquestioned; but when shedares to demand rights and privileges for herself, her motives, manners, dress, personal appearance, and character are subjects for ridicule and detraction.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Modesty and taste are questions of latitude and education; the more people know,--the more their ideas are expanded by travel, experience, and observation,--the less easily they are shocked. The narrowness and bigotry of women are the result of their circumscribed sphere of thought and action.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
You may consider me presumptuous, gentlemen, but I claim to be a citizen of the United States, with all the qualifications of a voter. I can read the Constitution, I am possessed of two hundred and fifty dollars, and the last time I looked in the old family Bible I found I was over twenty-one years of age.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton