Top 100 Quotes About Suffrage
#1. I believe Western culture
rule of law, universal suffrage, etc.
is preferable to Arab culture: that's why there are millions of Muslims in Scandinavia, and four Scandinavians in Syria. Follow the traffic. I support immigration, but with assimilation.
Mark Steyn
#2. Universal suffrage is sound in principle. The radical element is right.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#3. Just as the world war is no white man's war, but every man's war, so is the struggle for woman suffrage no white woman's struggle, but every woman's struggle.
Carrie Chapman Catt
#5. Suffrage is a common right of citizenship. Women have the right of suffrage. Logically it cannot be escaped.
Victoria Woodhull
#6. the upper classes instinctively abandoned idleness and invented meritocracy lest universal suffrage deprive them of everything they owned.
Thomas Piketty
#7. We fully believed, so soon as we saw that woman's suffrage was right, every one would soon see the same thing, and that in a year or two, at farthest, it would be granted.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
#8. Carry out the republican principle of universal suffrage, or strike it from your banners and substitute 'Freedom and Power to one half of society, and Submission and Slavery to the other.'
Ernestine Rose
#9. In the suffragist and abolitionist era, there were a lot of white women and some black men and women who argued for the old hierarchy and against universal adult suffrage - often on religious grounds.
Gloria Steinem
#10. 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
#11. A large portion of those who demand woman suffrage are persons who have not been trained to reason, and are chiefly guided by their generous sensibilities.
Catharine Beecher
#12. 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)
Susan B. Anthony
#13. I would rather be known as an advocate of equal suffrage than to speak every night on the best-paying platforms in the United States and ignore it.
Anna Howard Shaw
#14. If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.
George Bernard Shaw
#15. The most disappointing feature of working for a cause is that so few people have a philosophy of life. We used to say, in the suffrage movement, that we could trust the woman who believed in suffrage, but we could never trust the woman who just wanted to vote.
Jeannette Rankin
#16. Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
Geoffrey Hill
#17. Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.
Frank Chodorov
#18. Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail.
Albert J. Nock
#19. If there was to be equal manhood suffrage the whites would be swamped all over South Africa by the blacks and the whole position for which whites have striven for 200 years or more would be given up.
Jan Smuts
#20. In order to reach universal suffrage we need to build trust.
Donald Tsang
#21. Reputation is but a synonym of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.
Washington Allston
#22. We Chinese are instinctively democratic, and Dr. Sun's objective of universal suffrage evokes from all Chinese a ready and unhesitating response.
Chiang Kai-shek
#23. It's unfortunate that we see a great many women settling. They think that simply because they have gotten the right to vote, own property and have gained some simple freedoms that the battle for women's suffrage is over.
Frederick Lenz
#24. Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#25. While women's suffrage has not brought about the political millennium which its fondest backers predicted, its effects on the whole have been decidely beneficial.
Jessie Daniel Ames
#26. Father had notions about manhood suffrage, public schools, the education and the elevation of the masses, and the gradual emancipation of the slaves, that did not suit the uncompromising views of people in places like Richmond.
John Sergeant Wise
#27. Woman suffrage is an unjust, unreasonable, unspiritual abnormality. It is a hard, undigested, tasteless, devitalized proposition. It is a half-fledged, unmusical, Promethean abomination. It is a quack bolus to reduce masculinity even by the obliteration of femininity.
John Boyle O'Reilly
#29. I enter on the trust to which I have been called by the suffrage of my fellow-citizens with my fervent prayers to the Almighty that He will be graciously pleased to continue to us that protect which He has already so conspicuously displayed in our favor.
James Monroe
#30. The great constitutional corrective in the hands of the people against usurpation of power, or corruption by their agents is the right of suffrage; and this when used with calmness and deliberation will prove strong enough.
Andrew Jackson
#31. Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.
Thomas P.M. Barnett
#32. Were there no contrariety of interests, nothing would be more simple and easy than to form and preserve free institutions. The right of suffrage alone would be a sufficient guarantee. It is the conflict of opposing interests which renders it the most difficult work of man.
John C. Calhoun
#33. Suffrage, noun. Expression of opinion by means of a ballot. The right of suffrage (which is held to be both a privilege and a duty) means, as commonly interpreted, the right to vote for the man of another man's choice, and is highly prized.
Ambrose Bierce
#34. The Paris Commune was first and foremost a democracy. The government was a body elected by universal suffrage.
C.L.R. James
#35. I'd likte to welcome you to the land of free, where healthy, wealthy, happy people contribute to the civilization under the protection of the rules of capitalism, laws of science and rights of universal suffrage.
B. Barmanbek
#36. The first organised opposition by women to women's suffrage in England dates from 1889, when a number of ladies led by Mrs Ward appealed against the proposed extension of the Parliamentary suffrage to women.
Millicent Fawcett
#37. If the day hadn't yet convinced him of the merits of women's suffrage, it had certainly convinced him of the justness of the movement for Rational Dress.
Graham Moore
#38. The woman suffrage movement in the United States was a movement of the spirit of the Revolution which was striving to hold the nation to the ideals which won independence.
Carrie Chapman Catt
#39. When a battle for suffrage is conducted, it should only be conducted according to socialist principles, and therefore with the demand of universal suffrage for women and men.
Clara Zetkin
#40. To the Press, for the fair field its honest suffrage has opened to an obscure aspirant.
Charlotte Bronte
#41. American suffragist, speech "Is Woman Suffrage Progressing?" at Stockholm, Sweden Radicalism is a label that is always applied to people who are endeavoring to get freedom.
Marcus Garvey
#42. The excess of the voluptuary, like the austerities of the recluse, triumphs in the suffrage of perverted reason.
Samuel Parr
#43. Complete self-government for the province [gubernia and region], district and community through bureaucrats elected by universal suffrage; the abolition of all local and provincial authorities appointed by the state.
Vladimir Lenin
#44. Woman does not see what people of intellect perceived fifty years ago: that suffrage is an evil, that it has only helped to enslave people, that it has but closed their eyes that they may not see how craftily they were made to submit.
Emma Goldman
#45. The abolition and suffrage movements progressed when united and were damaged by division; we should remember that.
Gloria Steinem
#46. What is true of Mr. Mill's influence on the women's-suffrage question is true also of the other political movements in which he took an active interest.
Millicent Fawcett
#47. In fact, the gravest obstacle to the restoration of civilization in North America is universal suffrage. Letting everybody vote makes no sense. Obviously they are no good at it. The whole idea smacks of the fumble-witted idealism of a high-school Marxist society.
Fred Reed
#48. When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country.
Noah Webster
#49. I hope this view of the question may be a mistaken one, because it does not seem to me very unlikely that the suffrage will be granted to women.
John Bright
#50. I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms (by no means excluding females).
Abraham Lincoln
#51. If a large city can, after intense intellectual efforts, choose for its mayor a man who merely will not steal from it, we consider it a triumph of the suffrage.
Frank Moore Colby
#52. The definition of the right of suffrage is very justly regarded as a fundamental article of republican government.
James Madison
#53. 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
#54. A State which has universal suffrage and a wide extension of the jury franchise, must qualify the people by education to rightly exercise the great powers with which they are invested.
Edmund Barton
#55. [woman suffrage] has made little difference beyond doubling the number of voters. There is no woman's vote as such. They divide up just about as men do.
Alice Roosevelt Longworth
#56. White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage.
Carrie Chapman Catt
#57. Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull
#58. Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage.
Richard Flanagan
#59. Every man with a vote was considered a foe to woman suffrage unless he was prepared to be actively a friend.
Emmeline Pankhurst
#60. Socialists find me too far left; Trotskyites not far enough; ecologists say I am too happy eating foie gras, defending nuclear energy and GM plants; feminists find I am not enough of a woman; anarchists a petit-bourgeois who has sold out because I believe in universal suffrage.
Michel Onfray
#61. The "first woman judge" was a colorful figure whose activities inspired longer stories than the spare announcements that had followed the passage of the woman suffrage bill.
Taft Alfred Larson
#62. Extending over more than a century and including most nations of the globe, the cause of woman suffrage has been one of the great democratic forces in human history.
Ellen DuBois
#63. Universal suffrage is the government of a house by its nursery.
Otto Von Bismarck
#64. I worked for suffrage for years, and got it. I've worked for peace for 55 years and haven't come close.
Jeannette Rankin
#65. [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.
Susan B. Anthony
#66. The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women's Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.
Patrick Mendis
#67. Proof that they do not understand the republic is that in their fine promises for universal suffrage, they forgot women.
Delphine De Girardin
#68. Once I should have been, if not satisfied, partially, at least, contented with suffrage for the intelligent and those who have been soldiers; now I am convinced that universal suffrage is demanded by sound policy and impartial justice.
Salmon P. Chase
#69. When will the men do something besides extend congratulations? I would rather have President Roosevelt say one word to Congress infavor of amending the Constitution to give women the suffrage than to praise me endlessly!
Susan B. Anthony
#70. The women's suffrage movement is only the small edge of the wedge, if we allow women to vote it will mean the loss of social structure and the rise of every liberal cause under the sun. Women are well represented by their fathers, brothers, and husbands.
Winston Churchill
#71. Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
Anna Quindlen
#72. Universal suffrage should rest upon universal education. To this end, liberal and permanent provision should be made for the support of free schools by the State governments, and, if need be, supplemented by legitimate aid from national authority.
Rutherford B. Hayes
#73. This demonstrated to me that those who regard universal suffrage as a guarantee for good choices are under a complete illusion. Universal suffrage has other advantages, but not that one.
Alexis De Tocqueville
#74. To attach no importance to public opinion, is a proof that you do not merit its suffrage.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#75. Having a thirteen-year-old in the family is like having a general-admission ticket to the movies, radio and TV. You get to understand that the glittering new arts of our civilization are directed to the teen-agers, and by their suffrage they stand or fall.
Max Lerner
#76. 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
#77. The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people.
Emma Goldman
#78. The rational and peacable instrument of reform, the suffrage of the people.
Thomas Jefferson
#79. What the champions of suffrage understood was that the vote is not just a symbol of our equality, but that it can be, if used, a guarantee of results.
Hillary Clinton
#80. All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire.
Vilfredo Pareto
#81. While the Right of Suffrage is conceded to thousands notoriously ignorant, vicious, and drunken, ... a Constitutional denial to Black men, as such, of Political Rights freely secured to White men, is monstrously unjust and irrational.
Horace Greeley
#82. What ass first let loose the doctrine that the suffrage is a high boon and voting a noble privilege?
H.L. Mencken
#83. We can neither change nor overpower God's eternal suffrage against selfishness and meanness.
James Martineau
#84. The alleged menace of universal suffrage having been avoided by the absolute suppression of the negro vote, the spirit of mob murder should have been satisfied and the butchery of negroes should have ceased.
Ida B. Wells
#85. Do not stand in the way of the next step in human progress. No one living who reads the signs of the times but realizes that woman suffrage must come. We are working for the ballot as a matter of justice and as a step for human betterment.
Carrie Chapman Catt
#86. I expect to do more work for woman suffrage in the next decade than ever before.
Susan B. Anthony
#87. Aristocracy is that form of government in which education and discipline are qualifications for suffrage and office holding.
Aristotle.
#88. Scoundrels will be corrupt and unconcerned citizens apathetic under even the best constitution.
William Earl Maxwell
#89. Our 'pathway' is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#90. 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
#91. There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.
Susan B. Anthony
#92. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.
Susan B. Anthony
#93. Be militant in your own way! Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property ... do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. Take me if you dare! (Emmeline Pankhurst, 1912)
Fran Abrams
#94. it's hard as hell to get politicians excited about what we do out here, or about what you do, kay."
"the problem is, the dead don't vote," i said.
"i've heard of cases where they did.
Patricia Cornwell
#96. If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?
Victoria Claflin Woodhull
#97. There is no power in the world like that of women ... this most potent constituency we seek to represent, and for their suffrages we sue.
Louisa Lawson
#98. The confidence with which a Sovereign is invested, is solid only when it is sanctioned by the suffrages of the people, who clothed him with the supreme magistracy.
Napoleon Bonaparte
#99. 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.
Susan B. Anthony
#100. Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.
Oscar Wilde
