Susan B. Anthony Quotations

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less

Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.

I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.

I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations... can never effect a reform.

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

The day may be approaching when the whole world will recognize woman as the equal of man.

I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.

There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

You would better educate ten women into the practice of liberal principles than to organize a thousand on a platform of intolerance and bigotry.

No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.

Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!

I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ask for the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman.

The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball - the further I am rolled the more I gain.

I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men's rights are nothing more. Women's rights are nothing less.

Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.

An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.

This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.

Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.

Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.

The worst enemy women have is in the pulpit.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence.

I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of brutal masters.

I always distrust people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.

Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.

I beg you to speak of Woman as you do of the Negro, speak of her as a human being, as a citizen of the United States, as a half of the people in whose hands lies the destiny of this Nation.

I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.

I don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.

Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

White men have always controlled their wives' wages. Colored men were not able to do so until they themselves became free. Then they owned both their wives and their wages.

... while one-half of the people of the United States are robbed of their inherent right of personal representation in this freestcountry on the face of the globe, it is idle for us to expect that the men who thus rob women will not rob each other as individuals, corporations and Government.

Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South.

Every generation of converts threshes over the same old straw.

When woman has a newspaper which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely write her own thoughts.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.

Another writer asserts that the tyranny of man over woman has its roots, after all, in his nobler feelings; his love, his chivalry, and his desire to protect woman in the barbarous periods of pillage, lust, and war. But wherever the roots may be traced, the results at this hour are equally disastrous to woman. Her best interests and happiness do not seem to have been consulted in the arrangements made for her protection. She has been bought and sold, caressed and crucified at the will and pleasure of her master.

We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman's own thoughts, and not as woman thinks a man wants her to think and write.

Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.

I shall never pay a dollar of your unjust penalty. All the stock in trade I possess is a $10,000 debt, incurred by publishing my paper-The Revolution ... the sole object of which was to educate all women to do precisely as I have done, rebel against your man-made, unjust, unconstitutional forms of law, that tax, fine, imprison, and hang women, while they deny them the right of representation in the government.... I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old revolutionary maxim that 'Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.'

I have many things to say. My every right, constitutional, civil, political and judicial has been tramped upon. I have not only had no jury of my peers, but I have had no jury at all.

I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon. (on women's suffrage)

[Asked if American women would ever win full suffrage:] Assuredly. I firmly believed at one time that I should live to see that day. I have never for one moment lost faith. It will come but I shall not see itit is inevitable.

Resistance to tyranny ius obedience to God

The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.

Inconsistency is the jewel of the American people.

Gentlemen ... Do you not see that so long as society says a woman is incompetent to be a lawyer, minister or doctor, but has ample ability to be a teacher, that every man of you who chooses this profession tacitly acknowledges that he has no more brains than a woman?

When a man says to me, 'Let us work together in the great cause you have undertaken, and let me be your companion and aid, for I admire you more than I have ever admired any other woman,' then I shall say, 'I am yours truly'; but he must ask me to be his equal, not his slave.

When society is rightly organized, the wife and mother will have time, wish and will to grow intellectually, and will know that the limits of her sphere, the extent of her duties, are prescribed only by the measure of her ability.

Why should we not pray to our mother who are in heaven, as well as to our father?

it is only through a wholesome discontent with things as they are, that we ever try to make them any better.

It's too bad that our bodies wear out while our interests are just as strong as ever.

I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman.

Whichever way I turn, whatever phase of social life presents itself, the same conviction comes: Independent bread alone can redeem woman from her curse of subjection to man.

Many abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights.

To be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.

If a man's public record be a clear one, if he has kept his pledges before the world, I do not inquire what his private life may have been.

. . . this oligarchy of sex, which makes fathers, brothers, husbands and sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household - which ordains all men sovereigns, all women subjects, carries dissension, discord, and rebellion into every house of the nation.

A republican government should be based on free and equal education among the people

I can not imagine a God ... made happy by my getting down on my knees and calling him 'great'.

I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder...We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil, and destroy it.

I deplore the horrible crime as child murder....no matter what the motive, love of ease, or desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent,the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed...but oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which compelled her to the crime.

Disfranchisement means inability to make, shape, or control one's own circumstances... . That is exactly the position of women in the world of work today; they cannot choose.

Oh, yes. I'd do it all again; the spirit is willing yet; I feel the same desire to do the work but the flesh is weak. It's too bad that our bodies wear out while our interests are just as strong as ever.

I can see that "reap" and "deep," "prayers" and "bears," . . . do rhyme, and so I suppose it is a splendid effort, but if you had written it in plain prose, I could have understood it a great deal better and read it a great deal more easily.

Of all the old prejudices that cling to the hem of the woman's garments and persistently impede her progress, none holds faster than this. The idea that she owes service to a man instead of to herself, and that it is her highest duty to aid his development rather than her own, will be the last to die.

There is not the woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for any one who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons?

Cyling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world

I can't say that the college-bred woman is the most contented woman. The broader her mind the more she understands the unequal conditions between men and women, the more she chafes under a government that tolerates it.

It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death; but oh, thrice guilty is he who. . .drove her to the desperation which impelled her to the crime.

... in your ordered verdict of guilty you have trampled under foot every vital principle of our government. My natural rights, mycivil rights, my political rights, my judicial rights are all alike ignored. Robbed of the fundamental privilege of citizenship, I am degraded from the status of a citizen to that of a subject; and not only myself individually but all of my sex are, by your honor's verdict, doomed to political subjection under this so-called republican form of government.

Women should have equal pay for equal work and they should be considered equally eligible to the offices of principal and superintendent, professor and president. So you must insist that qualifications, not sex, shall govern appointments and salaries.

I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have giventhemselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.

If any proof were needed of the progress of the cause for which I have worked, it is here tonight. The presence on the stage of these college women, and in the audience of all those college girls who will some day be the nation's greatest strength, will tell their own story to the world.

For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the underlying principle of our Government, the right of consent, shall have practical application to the other half of people. Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be heeded.

The anti-suffragist talk of sheltering women from the fierce storms of life is a lot of cant. I have no patience with it. These storms beat on woman just as fiercely as they do on man, and she is not trained to defend herself against them.

... even if the right to vote brought to women no better work, no better pay, no better conditions in any way, she should have itfor her own self-respect and to compel man's respect for her.

Had I represented twenty thousand voters in Michigan, that political editor would not have known nor cared whether I was the oldest or the youngest daughter of Methuselah, or whether my bonnet came from the Ark or from Worth's.

No genuine equality, no real freedom, no true manhood or womanhood can exist on any foundation save that of pecuniary independence. As a right over a man's subsistence is a power over his moral being, so a right over a woman's subsistence enslaves her will, degrades her pride and vitiates her whole moral nature.

So long as State constitutions say that all may vote when twenty-one, save idiots, lunatics, convicts and women, you are brought down politically to the level of those others disfranchised.

There never seems to be any difficulty in stretching the laws and the constitution to fit any kind of a political deal, but when it is proposed to make some concession to women they loom up like an unscalable wall.

Of all my prosecutorsnot one is my peer, but each and all are my political sovereigns; and had your honor submitted my case to the jury, as was clearly your duty, then I should have had just cause of protest, for not one of those men was my peer; but, native or foreign born, white or black, rich or poor, educated or ignorant, sober or drunk, each and every man of them was my political superior; hence, in no sense, my peer.

I expect to do more work for woman suffrage in the next decade than ever before.

Now, Mr. President, we don't intend to trouble you during the campaign but after you are elected, then look out for us!

Better lose me than lose a state.

Current creation has exiled the turning wheel, and the same law of advancement makes the lady of today an alternate lady from her grandma.

Marriage, to woman as to man, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it.

For a people is only as great, as free, as lofty, as advanced as its women are free, noble and progressive.

The rank and file are not philosophers, they are not educated to think for themselves, but simply to accept, unquestioned, whatever comes.

Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

What an absurd notion that women have not intellectual and moral faculties sufficent for anything else but domestic concerns!

Would you exalt your profession, exalt those who labor with you...increase the salaries of the women engaged in the noble work of educating our future presidents, senators and congressmen.

Those of you who have the talent to do honor to poor womanhood, have all given yourself over to baby-making. . .

It is cruel for you to leave your daughter, so full of hope and resolve, to suffer the humiliations of disfranchisement she already feels so keenly, and which she will find more and more galling as she grows into the stronger and grander woman she is sure to be. If it were your son who for any cause was denied his right to have his opinion counted, you would compass sea and land to lift the ban from him.

It will be the mistake of your life if you go into print in your own defence [sic]. Your denial will reach a new set of people andstart them to talking, while the ones who read the original charges will never see the refutation of them.