Top 100 Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes
#1. I poured out the torrent of my long-standing discontent and I challenged them to do and dare anything.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#2. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self- sovereignty.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#3. With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#5. The wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#6. 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
#7. We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#8. 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
#9. To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#12. Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women's self development is self-sacrifice.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#13. Dress loose,take a great deal of exercise ,and be particular about your diet and sleep sound enough,the body has a great effect on the mind.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The voice of woman has been silenced in the state, the church, and the home, but man cannot fulfill his destiny alone, he cannot redeem his race unaided.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#17. 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
#18. The bible and the church have been the greatest stumbling block in the way of women's emancipation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#19. My religious superstition gave place to rational ideas based on scientific facts, and in proportion as I looked at everything from a new standpoint, I grew more happy day by day ...
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#20. 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
#22. A government is just only when the whole people share equally in its protection and advantages.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#23. A man in love will jump to pick up a glove or a bouquet for a silly girl of sixteen, whilst at home he will permit his aged mother to carry pails of water and armfuls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty-pound baby, hour after hour, without ever offe
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#24. Think of the inconvenience of vanishing as it were from your friends and, correspondents three times in one's natural life.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#26. Chauncy Burr ... talks well, possibly better than he thinks. But this is a common failing.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#27. But the love of offspring ... tender and beautiful as it is, can not as sentiment rank with conjugal love.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#29. 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
#30. I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#31. 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
#32. All honor to the noble women that have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of mankind!
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#33. There must be a remedy even for such a crying evil as this [abortion]. But where shall it be found, at least where begin, if not in the complete enfranchisement and elevation of women?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#34. 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
#35. 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
#36. 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
#37. To live for a principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are to be lifted up to be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#39. How the little courtesies of life on the surface of society, deemed so important from man towards woman, fade into utter insignificance in view of the deeper tragedies in which she must play her part alone, where no human aid is possible.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#41. Without fear of contradiction, I can safely say that every step in progress that woman has made she has been assailed by ecclesiastics, that her most vigilant unwearied opponents have always been the clergy ...
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#42. 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
#44. To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#46. 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
#47. We found nothing grand in the history of the Jews nor in the morals inculcated in the Pentateuch. I know of no other books that so fully teach the subjection and degradation of woman.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#48. We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#49. We are, as a sex, infinitely superior to men, and if we were free and developed, healthy in body and mind, as we should be under natural conditions, our motherhood would be our glory. That function gives women such wisdom and power as no male can possess.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#50. 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
#53. What an infernal set of fools those schoolmarms must be! Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them. The sooner the present generation of women dies out, the better. We have idiots enough in the world now without such women propagating any more.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#54. Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#55. In her present ignorance, woman's religion, instead of making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great principles ofright and justice, has made her bondage but more certain and lasting, her degradation more hopeless and complete.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#56. The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#57. 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
#58. Women have crucified the Mary Wollstonecrafts, the Fanny Wrights, and the George Sands of all ages. Men mock us with the fact and say we are ever cruel to each other ... If this present woman must be crucified, let men drive the spikes.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#59. The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#60. Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love-friends, counselors-a mutual support and inspiration to each other amid life's struggles, must know the highest human happiness;-this is marriage; and this is the only cornerstone of an enduring home.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#61. 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
#62. The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#64. 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
#65. The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#66. 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
#67. To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#68. We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#69. 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
#71. If the Bible teaches the equality of women, why does the church refuse to ordain women to preach the gospel, to fill the offices of deacons and elders, and to administer the Sacraments ... ?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#72. 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
#73. Who can sum up all the ills the women of a nation suffer from war? They have all of the misery and none of the glory; nothing to mitigate their weary waiting and watching for the loved ones who return no more.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#74. I think if women would indulge more freely in vituperation, they would enjoy ten times the health they do. It seems to me they are suffering from repression.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#75. Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#76. It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#77. Dr. Oaks made the remark that, according to the best estimate he could make, there were four hundred murders annually produced by abortion in that county alone ... There must be a remedy for such a crying evil as this.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#78. The future historian will rank him as one of the heroes of the nineteenth century.
{Stanton's opinion of the great Robert Ingersoll}
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#79. Social science affirms that a woman's place in society marks the level of civilization.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#80. Not only dowomen sufferindignities in daily life, but the literature of the world proclaims their inferiority and divinely decreed subjection in all history, sacred and profane, in science, philosophy, poetry, and song.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#81. I see by the papers that you have once more stirred that pool of intellectual stagnation, the educational convention.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#84. So it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, in the long, weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity, to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#85. 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
#86. I thought that the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous. So I decided to study Greek and learn to manage a horse.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#87. Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#88. Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood, the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked God's blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#91. Did I not feel that the time has come for the questions of women's wrongs to be laid before the public? Did I not believe that women herself must do this work, for women alone understand the height, the depth, the breadth of her degradation.
- Seneca Falls Convention, 1848
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#92. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#93. 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
#94. It is in vain to look for the elevation of woman so long as she is degraded in marriage.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#95. 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
#96. So closely interwoven have been our lives, our purposes, and experiences that, separated, we have a feeling of incompleteness
united, such strength of self-association that no ordinary obstacles, difficulties, or dangers ever appear to us insurmountable.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#98. 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
#99. 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
#100. Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
