Dorothea Dix Quotations

[To a woman who claimed she'd rather be dead than unconfined and unfashionable:] My dear, if you continue to lace as tightly as you do now, you will not long have the privilege of choice. You will be both dead and out of fashion.

I think even lying on my bed I can still do something.

But the truth is the highest consideration.

A man usually values that most for which he has labored; he uses that most frugally which he has toiled hour by hour and day by day to acquire.

Brains are still unfashionable for women to wear, and it has always been proof of women's superiority that the more intelligent a man is, the more women admire him, while the bigger fool a woman is, the more men run after her.

The tapestry of history has no point at which you can cut it and leave the design intelligible.

I have no particular love for my species, but own to an exhaustless fund of compassion

Be of good cheer, for sadness cannot heal the national wounds.

in proportion as my own discomfort has increased, my conviction of necessity to search into the wants of the friendless and afflicted has deepened. If I am cold, they too are cold; if I am weary, they are distressed; if I am alone, they are abandoned.

Society, during the last hundred years, has been alternately perplexed and encouraged, respecting the two great questions -how shall the criminal and pauper be disposed of, in order to reduce crime and reform the criminal on the one hand, and, on the other, to diminish pauperism and restore the pauper to useful citizenship?