Elizabeth Cady Stanton famous quotes

The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Strength #Courage #Peace

The best protection any woman can have... is courage.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Motivational #Inspiring #Sad

The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Birthday #Two Sides #Heyday

When women understand that governments and religions are human inventions; that Bibles, prayer-books, catechisms, and encyclical letters are all emanations from the brains of man, they will no longer be oppressed by the injunctions that come to them with the divine authority of *Thus sayeth the Lord.*
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Atheist #Prayer #Book

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Responsibility #Judging #Judgment

When we consider that women are treated as property it is degrading to women that we should treat our children as property to be disposed of as we see fit.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Children #Abortion #Fit

That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Real #Law #Long

To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Education #Eye #Way

Woman's discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Development #Increase #Proportion

I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Fitness #Busy #Reason

Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Atheist #Book #Law

The Church is a terrible engine of oppression, especially as concerns woman
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Church #Oppression #Terrible

Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Country #Justice #Sacred

What will we and our daughters suffer if these degraded black men are allowed to have the rights that would make them even worse than our Saxon fathers?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Daughter #Father #Men

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

#Men #May #Bears

The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Mom #Mother #Wife

The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Struggle #Past #Equality

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Inspiring #Women #Equality

There is a solitude, which each and every one of us has always carried with him, more inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains, more profound than the midnight sea; the solitude of self. Our inner being, which we call ourself, no eye nor touch of man or angel has ever pierced.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Eye #Angel #Men

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Moving #Dew #Wipe

Human beings lose their logic in their vindictiveness.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Logic #Humans #Vindictiveness

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Bible #Block #Biblical

Woman's degradation is in mans idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Women #Rights #Law

How long will the heathens rage?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Long #Rage #Heathen

The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world. I don't believe that any man ever talked with god. The bible was written by man out of his love of domination.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Believe #Men #Religion

The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Teaching #Aggravation #Church

With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Forever #Age #Would Be

I would have girls regard themselves not as adjectives but as nouns.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Girl #Witty #Women

Nature, like a loving mother, is ever trying to keep land and sea, mountain and valley, each in its place, to hush the angry winds and waves, balance the extremes of heat and cold, of rain and drought, that peace, harmony and beauty may reign supreme.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Beauty #Mother #Nature

To develop our real selves, we need time alone for thought and meditation. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Running #Real #Self

Because man and woman are the complement of one another, we need woman's thought in national affairs to make a safe and stable government.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Men #Needs #Safe

Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions - requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs - there was no attention given to preparation for this office.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Motherhood #Office #Preparation

The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Change #Peace #Ubuntu

Self-development is a higher duty than self-sacrifice.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Inspirational #Sacrifice #Self

Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Success #Spiritual #Love Yourself

Truth is the only safe ground to stand on.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Truth #Learning #Safe

No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims ...
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Order #Victim

I do believe that half a dozen commonplace attorneys could so mystify and misconstrue the Ten Commandments, and so confuse Moses' surroundings on Mount Sinai, that the great law-giver, if he returned to this planet, would doubt his own identity, abjure every one of his deliverances, yea, even commend the very sins he so clearly forbade his people.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Believe #Law #People

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

#Marriage #Thinking #Two

The first step in the elevation of women under all systems of religion is to convince them that the great Spirit of the Universe is in no way responsible for any of these absurdities.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Way #Firsts #Steps

Men as a general rule have very little reverence for trees.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Men #Tree #Littles

I had been invited to speak after the lunch. But I did not go to the table until the feast ended, as I never like to eat or talk before speaking.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Lunch #Tables #Speak

Though woman needs the protection of one man against his whole sex, in pioneer life, in threading her way through a lonely forest, on the highway, or in the streets of the metropolis on a dark night, she sometimes needs, too, the protection of all men against this one.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Lonely #Sex #Dark

Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Shadow #Pathways #Boxes

To think that all in me of which my father would have felt proper pride had I been a man, is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Father #Women #Pride

Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Enemy #Atheism #Violent

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

#Children #Holiday #Eye

Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Atheism #Doctrine #Asceticism

Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Children #Men #Soul

[On women's role in the home:] Every wife, mother and housekeeper feels at present that there is some screw loose in the household situation.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Mother #Women #Home

How can any woman believe that a loving and merciful God would, in one breath, command Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, and in the next, pronounce a curse upon her maternity? I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or gave out the laws about women which he is accused of doing.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Believe #Law #Atheism

I often saw weary little women coming to the table after most exhausting labors, and large, bumptious husbands spreading out their hands and thanking the Lord for the meals that the dear women had prepared, as if the whole came down like manna from heaven. So I preached a sermon in the blessing I gave. You will notice that it has three heresies in it: Heavenly Father and Mother, make us thankful for all the blessings of this life, and make us ever mindful of the patient hands that oft in weariness spread our tables and prepare our daily food. For humanity's sake, Amen.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Mother #Husband #Father

It is in vain to look for the elevation of woman so long as she is degraded in marriage.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Marriage #Long #Looks

I think all these reverend gentlemen who insist on the word 'obey' in the marriage service should be removed for a clear violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, which says there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude within the United States.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Marriage #Thinking #Gentleman

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

#Disappointment #Passion #Ambition

You who have read the history of nations, from Moses down to our last election, where have you ever seen one class looking after the interests of another?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Class #Lasts #Election

Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women's affairs!
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Men #Average #Trying

There is no such thing as a sphere for sex. Every man has a different sphere, in which he may or may not shine, and it is the same with every woman, and the same woman may have a different sphere at different times.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Sex #Men #Shining

The queens in history compare favorably with the kings.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Kings #Queens #Royalty

All who live to a good old age have a genius for sleep.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Sleep #Age #Genius

Chauncy Burr ... talks well, possibly better than he thinks. But this is a common failing.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Thinking #Talking #Speech

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

#Rights #Class #Community

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Religion #World #Earth

The great fault of mankind is that it will not think.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Thinking #Faults #Mankind

The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities of higher education, for the full development of her faculties, forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear - is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Responsibility #Opportunity #Giving

I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals - grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to the unknown god.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Feelings #Religion #Generations

Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#World #Laborers

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

#Mother #Men #Thinking

Men who can, when they wish to write a document, shut themselves up for days with their thoughts and their books, know little of what difficulties a woman must surmount to get off a tolerable production.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Book #Writing #Men

religious superstitions more than all other influences put together cripple & enslave woman, but so long as women themselves do not see it & hug their chains, we have a great educational work to do ...
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Religious #Educational #Long

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

#Intelligent #Men #Zest

I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Book #Atheism #Degradation

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

#People #Modesty #Action

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

#Believe #Individualism #Reason

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded--a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Character #Responsibility #Recognition

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

#Intellectual #Cheerful #Trying

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

#Taken #Deception #Desire

The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Giving #Support #Quality

I have met few men in my life, worth repeating eight times.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Motherhood #Men

... women feel the humiliation of their petty distinctions of sex precisely as the black man feels those of color. It is no palliation of our wrongs to say that we are not socially ostracized, so long as we are politically ostracized as he is not.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Men #Long #Black

When lions paint pictures men will not always be represented as conquerors. When women translate laws, constitutions, bibles and philosophies, man will not always be the declared heard of the church, the state, and the home.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Philosophy #Home #Power

... 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

#Swimming #Sailing #Together

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

#Past #Men #Long

... 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

#Character #Long #Appearance

Every man who is not for us in this prolonged struggle for liberty is responsible for the present degradation of the mothers of the race. It is pitiful to see how few men ever have made our cause their own, but while leaving us to fight our battle alone, they have been unsparing in their criticism of every failure. Of all the battles for liberty in the long past, woman only has been left to fight her own, without help and with all the powers of earth and heaven, human and divine, arrayed against her.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Mother #Struggle #Fighting

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

#Gentleman #Age #Constitution

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

#People #Republican #Rulers

... women learned one important lesson--namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women's feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement.... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#War #Men #Feelings

... the hey-day of a woman's life is on the shady side of fifty, when the vital forces heretofore expended in other ways are garnered in the brain, when their thoughts and sentiments flow out in broader channels, when philanthropy takes the place of family selfishness, and when from the depths of poverty and suffering the wail of humanity grows as pathetic to their ears as once was the cry of their own children.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Sympathy #Children #Humanity

... 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

#Boys #Past #Giving

I see by the papers that you have once more stirred that pool of intellectual stagnation, the educational convention.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Educational #Intellectual #Pool

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

#Men #Storm #Hardship

Let the girl be thoroughly developed in body and soul, not modeled, like a piece of clay, after some artificial specimen of humanity, with a body like some plate in Godey's book of fashion, and a mind after the type of Father Gregory's pattern daughters, loaded down with the traditions, proprieties, and sentimentalities of generations of silly mothers and grandmothers, but left free to be, to grow, to feel, to think, to act. Development is one thing, that system of cramping, restraining, torturing, perverting, and mystifying, called education, is quite another.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Girl #Daughter #Mother

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

#Girl #Work #Boys

A very wise father once remarked, that in the government of his children, he forbid as few things as possible; a wise legislature would do the same. It is folly to make laws on subjects beyond human prerogative, knowing that in the very nature of things they must be set aside. To make laws that man cannot and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt. It is very important in a republic, that the people should respect the laws, for if we throw them to the winds, what becomes of civil government?
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Wise #Children #Father

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

#Race #Views #Law

I can say that the happiest period of my life has been since I emerged from the shadows and superstitions of the old theologies, relieved from all gloomy apprehensions of the future, satisfied that as my labors and capacities were limited to this sphere of action, I was responsible for nothing beyond my horizon, as I could neither understand nor change the condition of the unknown world. Giving ourselves, then, no trouble about the future, let us make the most of the present, and fill up our lives with earnest work here.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Giving #Shadow #Atheism

One remarkable fact stands out in the history of witchcraft; and that is, its victims were chiefly women. Scarce one wizard to a hundred witches was ever burned or tortured.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Atheism #Wizards #Facts

Whatever oppressions man has suffered, they have invariably fallen more heavily on woman. Whatever new liberties advancing civilization has brought to man, ever the smallest measure has been accorded to woman, as a result of church teaching. The effect of this is seen in every department of life.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Teaching #Men #Civilization

As women are taking an active part in pressing on the consideration of Congress many narrow sectarian measures, such as more rigid Sunday laws, the stopping of travel, the distribution of the mail on that day, and the introduction of the name of God into the Constitution; and as this action on the part of some women is used as an argument for the disfranchisement of all, I hope this convention will declare that the Woman Suffrage Association is opposed to all union of Church and State, and pledges itself as far as possible to maintain the secular nature of our Government.
-- Elizabeth Cady Stanton

#Sunday #Names #Government