Susan B. Anthony Quotes

There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.

I want you to understand that I never could have done the work I have if I had not had this woman at my right hand.

There is not the slightest permission for the states to discriminate against the right of any class of citizens to vote. Surely to regulate cannot be to annihilate! Nor to qualify, to wholly deprive. And this principle every republican said amen, when applied to black men by Senator Sumner in his great speeches for “Equal rights to all,” from 1865 to 1869; and when, in 1871, I asked the Senator to declare the power of the United States Constitution to protect women in their right to vote, as he had done for black men, he handed me a copy of all his speeches during that reconstruction period, and said, "Miss Anthony, put sex where I have “race or color,” and you have here the best and strongest argument I can make for woman. There is not a doubt but women have the constitutional right to vote, and I will never vote for a 16th amendment to guarantee it to them. I voted for both the 14th and 15th under protest. Would never have done it but for the pressing emergency; would have insisted that the power of the original Constitution to protect all citizens in the equal enjoyment of their rights should have been vindicated through the courts. But the newly-freed men had neither the intelligence, wealth, nor the time to wait that slow process. Women possess all these, and I insist that they shall appeal to the courts, and through them establish the powers of our American magna charta to protect every citizen of the Republic." But, friends, when in accordance with Senator Sumner’s counsel, I went to the ballot-box, last November, and exercised my citizen’s right to vote, the courts did not wait for me to appeal to them — they appealed to me, and indicted me on the charge of having voted illegally.

When a man says to me, 'Let us work together in the great cause you have undertaken, and let me be your companion and aid, for I admire you more than I have ever admired any other woman,' then I shall say, 'I am yours truly'; but he must ask me to be his equal, not his slave.

I have many things to say. My every right, constitutional, civil, political and judicial has been tramped upon. I have not only had no jury of my peers, but I have had no jury at all.

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...

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.

Is there a man who will not agree with me, that to talk of “freedom without the ballot” is mockery, is slavery, to the women of this republic, precisely as New England’s orator, Wendell Phillips, at the close of the late war declared it to be to the newly emancipated black men?

Here, in the first paragraph of the Declaration [of Independence], is the assertion of the natural right of all to the ballot; for how can "the consent of the governed" be given, if the right to vote be denied?

I am delighted to have the opportunity to talk to women who are comfortably circumstanced, to those who have good fathers, kind brothers and have married the best of men, who do not believe that husband and wife are one and he is the one.

On 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. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. It makes her feel as if she were independent. The moment she takes her seat, she knows she can't get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammelled womanhood." On teaching: "In those days, we did not know any other way to control children. We believed in the goodness of not sparing the rod. As I got older, I abolished whipping. If I couldn't manage a child, I thought it my ignorance, my lack of ability, as a teacher. I always felt less the woman when I struck a blow." "I must have an audience to inspire me ... to save my life, I couldn't write a speech". "It all rose out of the men refusing to let me speak" at a temperance meeting. "Women were the bond slaves of men". "I know God never made a woman to be bossed by a man". "The law says that only idiots, lunatics and criminals shall be denied the right to vote. So you see with whom all women are classed." "When two people take each other on terms of perfect equality, without the desire of one to control the other to make the other subservient, it is a beautiful thing. It is the truest and highest state of life." "I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper and drudge. ... Once men were afraid of women with ideas and a desire to vote. Today, our best suffragists are sought in marriage by the best class of men."

Even, under such circumstances, a commoner of England, tried before a jury of Lords, would have far less cause to complain than should I, a woman, tried before a jury of men.

...the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.

The industrial upheavals of our time have exposed the unjust limitations placed upon women. We must unite and demand not only the ballot but also a redefinition of our roles and rights in this changing society.

The fact is women are in chains, and their servitude is all the more debasing because they do not realize.