Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

137 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

Elizabeth Cady Stanton