Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes
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With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?
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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.
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... 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.
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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.
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I can truly say, after an experience of seventy years, that all the cares and anxieties, the trials and disappointments of my whole life, are light, when balanced with my sufferings in childhood and youth from the theological dogmas which I sincerely believed. . . . The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstitions of the Christian religion.
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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.
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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.
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Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.
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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.
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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.
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Whether our feet are compressed in iron shoes, our faces hidden with veils and masks; whether yoked with cows to draw the plow through its furrows, or classed with idiots, lunatics and criminals in the laws and constitutions of the State, the principle is the same; for the humiliations of the spirit are as real as the visible badges of servitude.
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While women were tortured, drowned and burned by the thousands, scarce one wizard to a hundred was ever condemned ... The same distinction of sex appears in our own day. One code of morals for men, another for women.
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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.
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It is as disastrous to true government in the state, and home, to teach all womankind to submit to the authority of man, as divinely ordained, as it is to teach all mankind to bow down to the authority of kings and Popes, as divinely ordained.
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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.
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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.
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A woman will always be dependent until she holds a purse of her own.
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To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.
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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.
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We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.
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... 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.
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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.
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The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. In the hours of our keenest sufferings all are thrown wholly on themselves for consolation.
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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.