Quotes from Jeannette Rankin

Bribes are not offered in such a way that you can prove them, and in order to prove that I didn't accept a bribe, I had to run.

Men are not killed because they get mad at each other. They're killed because one of them has a gun in any dispute.

You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go.

What one decides to do in crisis depends on one's philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn't any philosophy in crises, others make the decision.

Small use it will be to save democracy for the race if we cannot save the race for democracy.

We have to get it into our heads once and for all that we cannot settle disputes by eliminating human beings.

I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.

The individual woman is required... a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.

It will be hard to convince people that their welfare is safe in the hands of a federal government when they feel themselves the victims of unjust sectional discrimination.

There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.

If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again, but this time I would be nastier.

As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.

If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute.

Might it not be that a great force that has always been thinking in terms of human needs, and that always will think in terms of human needs, has not been mobilized? Is it not possible that the women of the country have something of value to give the nation at this time?

The most important accomplishment, I believe, was my voting against the First World War.

I have nothing left but my integrity.

War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

We're half the people, we should be half the Congress.

The greatest threat to peace is the barrage of rightist propaganda portraying war as decent, honorable, and patriotic.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war

Go! Go! Go! It makes no difference where, just so you go! Go! Go! Remember, at the first opportunity, go.

It is important for people to be able to read all sides of every question; for a feeling of national unity does not come from one-sided or inadequate information, but from a sense of freedom impartially secured and of opportunity equalized by a just government.

Men and women are like right and left hands: it doesn't make sense not to use both.