Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

137 Sourced Quotes

Susan had an earnest soul, a conscience tending to morbidity.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
I want to say one word to the men who are present. I fear you think the 'new woman' is going to wipe you off the planet, but be not afraid. All who have mothers, sisters, wives or sweethearts will be very well looked after.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
American women of wealth, education, virtue and refinement, if you do not wish the lower orders of Chinese, Africans, Germans and Irish, with their low ideas of womanhood, to make laws for you and your daughters awake to the danger of your present position and demand that woman, too, shall be represented in the government!

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
My religious superstition gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts, and in proportion as I looked at everything from a new standpoint, I grew more happy day by day...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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
Well, another female child is born into the world! Last Sunday afternoon, Harriot Eaton Stanton - oh! the little heretic thus to desecrate that holy holiday - opened her soft blue eyes on this mundane sphere.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. In the hours of our keenest sufferings all are thrown wholly on themselves for consolation.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
A mind always in contact with children and servants, whose aspirations and ambitions rise no higher than the roof that shelters it, is necessarily dwarfed in its proportions.

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
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
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
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
I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Women and negroes, being seven-twelfths of the people, are a majority; and according to our republican theory, are the rightful rulers of the nation.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
God, in His wisdom, has so linked the whole human family together that any violence done at one end of the chain is felt throughout its length.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Where no individual in a community is denied his rights, the mass are the more perfectly protected in theirs; for whenever any class is subject to fraud or injustice, it shows that the spirit of tyranny is at work, and no one can tell where or how or when the infection will spread...

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
It is through the perversion of the religious element in woman, playing upon her hopes and fears of the future, holding this life with all its high duties in abeyance to that which is to come, that she and the children she has trained have been so completely subjugated by priestcraft and superstition.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Whatever the theories may be of woman's dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Our scholarships should be bestowed on those whose ability and earnestness in the primary department have been proved, and whose capacity for a higher education is fully shown. This is the best work women of wealth can do, and I hope in the future they will endow scholarships for their own sex instead of giving millions of dollars to institutions for boys, as they have done in the past.

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