Quotes from Elizabeth Cady Stanton

There is a solitude which each and every one of us has always carried within. More inaccessible than the ice-cold mountains more profound than the midnight sea: the solitude of self.

I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

the wrongs of society can be more deeply impressed on a large class of readers in the form of fiction than by essays, sermons, or the facts of science.

A woman will always be dependent until she holds a purse of her own.

The greatest block today in the way of woman's emancipation is the church, the canon law, the Bible and the priesthood.

I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions, and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy in life.

It is the inalienable right of all to be happy.

Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.

With age come the inner, the higher life. Who would be forever young, to dwell always in externals?

Come, come, my conservative friend, wipe the dew off your spectacles, and see that the world is moving.

The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women's emancipation.

To develop our real selves, we need time alone for thought and meditation. To be always giving out and never pumping in, the well runs dry.

No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life.

Woman's degradation is in man's idea of his sexual rights. Our religion, laws, customs, are all founded on the belief that woman was made for man. Come what will, my whole soul rejoices in the truth that I have uttered.

Our "pathway" is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning…. We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.

The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The Negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.

The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.

Woman has relied heretofore too entirely for her support on the needle - that one-eyed demon of destruction that slays thousands annually; that evil genius of our sex, which, in spite of all our devotion, will never make us healthy, wealthy, or wise.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion that has breathed upon this earth, has degraded women. There is not one that has not always made her subject to man.

We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?

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