Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes
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When women can support themselves, have entry to all the trades and professions, with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm.
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The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.
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So long as women are slaves, men will be knaves.
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... 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.
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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.
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The heyday of woman's life is the shady side of fifty.
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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.
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Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe -the open sesame to every soul.
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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.
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The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.
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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.
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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.
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The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.
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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.
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The new religion will teach the dignity of human nature and its infinite possibilities for development. It will teach the solidarity of the race: that all must rise and fall as one. Its creed will be justice, liberty, equality for all the children of earth.
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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.
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To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.
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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?
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Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility.
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If we buy a plant of a horticulturist we ask him many questions as to its needs, whether it thrives best in sunshine or in shade, whether it needs much or little water, what degrees of heat or cold; but when we hold in our arms for the first time a being of infinite possibilities, in whose wisdom may rest the destiny of a nation, we take it for granted that the laws governing its life, health, and happiness are intuitively understood, that there is nothing new to be learned in regard to it.
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Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman's position.
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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.
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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.
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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.