Quotes from Susan B. Anthony

No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

I don't want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.

Failure is impossible" - Susan B. Anthony

This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.

I deplore the horrible crime of child-murder...We want prevention, not merely punishment. We must reach the root of the evil, and destroy it.

When woman has a newspaper which fear and favor cannot touch, then it will be that she can freely write her own thoughts.

I do not consider divorce an evil by any means. It is just as much a refuge for women married to brutal men as Canada was to the slaves of brutal masters.

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people -- women as well as men.

Many Abolitionists have yet to learn the ABC of woman's rights.

We need a daily paper edited and composed according to woman's own thoughts, and not as woman thinks a man wants her to think and write.

There is no history about which there is so much ignorance as this great movement for the establishment of equal political rights for women. I hope the twentieth century will see the triumph of our cause.

The prolonged slavery of woman is the darkest page in human history.

A woman growing up under American ideas of liberty in government and religion, having never blushed behind a Turkish mask, nor pressed her feet in Chinese shoes, cannot brook any disabilities based on sex alone, without a deep feeling of antagonism with the power that creates it.

We assert the province of government to be to secure the people in the enjoyment of their unalienable rights. We throw to the winds the old dogma that governments can give rights.

Every generation of converts threshes over the same old straw.

Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.

It is often asserted that as woman has always been man's slave--subject--inferior--dependent, under all forms of government and religion, slavery must be her normal condition. This might have some weight had not the vast majority of men also been enslaved for centuries to kings and popes, and orders of nobility, who, in the progress of civilization, have reached complete equality.

One-half of the people of this nation today are utterly powerless to blot from the statute books an unjust law, or to write there a new and a just one.

The change needed to restore good feeling cannot be reached by remanding women to the spinning wheel, and the contentment of her grandmother, but by conceding to her every right which the spirit of the age demands. Modern invention has banished the spinning wheel, and the same law of progress makes the woman of today a different woman from her grandmother.

I am asked to speak upon "The Moral Leadership of the Religious Press." For one who has for fifty years been ridiculed by both press and pulpit, denounced as infidel by both, it is, to say the least, very funny. Nevertheless I am glad to stand here today as an object lesson of the survival of the fittest, from ridicule and contempt.

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences.