Emmeline Pankhurst Quotes

21 Sourced Quotes

I was transfixed with horror, and over me there swept the sudden conviction that that hanging was a mistake — worse, a crime. It was my awakening to one of the most terrible facts of life — that justice and judgment lie often a world apart.

Emmeline Pankhurst
The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.

Emmeline Pankhurst
I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness of a man made world, before I reached the point where I could successfully revolt against it.

Emmeline Pankhurst
A defiant deed has greater value than unnumerable thousands of words.

Emmeline Pankhurst
The moving spirit of militancy is deep and abiding reverence for human life.

Emmeline Pankhurst
The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood. The militancy of women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the battle of righteousness.

Emmeline Pankhurst
There is something that Governments care far more for than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy…I say to the Government: You have not dared to take the leaders of Ulster for their incitement to rebellion. Take me if you dare.

Emmeline Pankhurst
Women had always fought for men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own human rights. Our militant movement was established.

Emmeline Pankhurst
Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress.

Emmeline Pankhurst
I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting. Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the meeting, and I begged her to let me go along.

Emmeline Pankhurst
Manchester is a city which has witnessed a great many stirring episodes, especially of a political character. Generally speaking, its citizens have been liberal in their sentiments, defenders of free speech and liberty of opinion.

Emmeline Pankhurst
Governments have always tried to crush reform movements, to destroy ideas, to kill the thing that cannot die. Without regard to history, which shows that no Government have ever succeeded in doing this, they go on trying in the old, senseless way.

Emmeline Pankhurst
I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice.

Emmeline Pankhurst
I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.

Emmeline Pankhurst
My childhood was protected by love and a comfortable home. Yet, while still a very young child, I began instinctively to feel that there was something lacking, even in my own home, some false conception of family relations, some incomplete ideal.

Emmeline Pankhurst
If it is right for men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would be like today if men had not, since time began, fought for their freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the freedom of the children they bear.

Emmeline Pankhurst
We never went to prison in order to be martyrs. We went there in order that we might obtain the rights of citizenship. We were willing to break laws that we might force men to give us the right to make laws.

Emmeline Pankhurst
Often I have heard the taunt that suffragists are women who have failed to find any normal outlet for their emotions, and are therefore soured and disappointed beings. This is probably not true of any suffragist, and it is most certainly not true of me. My home life and relations have been as nearly ideal as possible in this imperfect world.

Emmeline Pankhurst
I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my temperament and my surroundings, I could scarcely have been otherwise.

Emmeline Pankhurst
Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.

Emmeline Pankhurst
It always seems to me when the anti-suffrage members of the Government criticize militancy in women that it is very like beasts of prey reproaching gentler animals who turn in desperate resistance when at the point of death.

Emmeline Pankhurst