Victoria Woodhull Quotes

[Asked if being interviewed is a form of torture for her] No, people always think I hate doing interviews. I don't. I wouldn't do them if I didn't like them. I have to say that at the start of every interview.

They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform... The world moves.

The Italians have got opera, the Spanish have got flamenco dancing. What have we got? Weight Watchers.

[On a difficult relationship with her mother, Helen] If she'd only gone out to work, we would all have been a lot happier. Being in the house drove her mad. She hated housework, cooking. She'd go into the garden and chop down trees. She was full of energy and batting against the walls with it. And this gave me a real sense that you had to have your own life. It's ridiculous to stay at home with your children if it drives you nuts. Children would much rather see a happy, smiley person come back.

If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. Women have no government. Men have organized a government, and they maintain it to the utter exclusion of women.... Under such glaring inconsistencies, such unwarrantable tyranny, such unscrupulous despotism, what is there left [for] women to do but to become the mothers of the future government? There is one alternative left, and we have resolved on that. This convention is for the purpose of this declaration. As surely as one year passes from this day, and this right is not fully, frankly and unequivocally considered, we shall proceed to call another convention expressly to frame a new constitution and to erect a new government, complete in all its parts and to take measures to maintain it as effectually as men do theirs. We mean treason; we mean secession, and on a thousand times grander scale than was that of the south. We are plotting revolution; we will overslough this bogus republic and plant a government of righteousness in its stead, which shall not only profess to derive its power from consent of the governed but shall do so in reality.

People think I hate sex. I don’t. I just don’t like things that stop you seeing the television properly.

[Asked if she ever had childhood holidays in Blackpool] No. What do you take me for? We used to go to Vienna.

Promiscuity in sexuality is simply the anarchical stage of development wherein the passions rule supreme. When spirituality comes in and rescues the real man and woman from the domain of the purely material, promiscuity is simply impossible. As promiscuity is the analogue to anarchy, so is spirituality to scientific selection and adjustment. I am fully persuaded that the very highest unions are those that are monogamic, and that these are perfect in proportion as they are lasting. Sexual freedom means the abolition of prostitution, both in and out of marriage; means the emancipation of woman and her coming into ownership and control of her body; means the end of her pecuniary dependence upon man, so that she may never, even seemingly, have to procure whatever she may desire or need by sexual favor; means the abrogation of forced pregnancy, of ante-natal murder of undesired children, endowed by every inherited virtue that the highest exaltation can confer at conception, by every influence for good to be obtained during gestation, and by the wisest guidance and instruction on to manhood industrially and intellectually.

Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child, nor think of murdering one before its birth.

[On remaining unattached after a divorce] Well, I think there's not much of a chance for me finding somebody of my age. Gentlemen of my age are dropping down 30 years to find girlfriends. [Informed: "That's not always the case."] You're right. I need to get out of the house.

I was researching Mrs Brown’s Boys and found that, with music hall, Laurel and Hardy, Les Dawson, Dick Emery and so on, more men had played working-class women in British comedy than women. [...] That's up until Victoria Wood. She almost single-handedly changed that. She and Billy Connolly essentially prepared the way for alternative comedy and the rise of the stand-up — bridging the gap between the working men's clubs and the comedy clubs. Before her, funny women were from a rarefied sphere like Joyce Grenfell. Wood spoke the way real people spoke and she was hugely successful. She made it possible for Tracey Ullman, even Peter Kay, to think a career was possible.

Sometimes I think that being widowed is God's way of telling you to come off the pill.

Many women who would be shocked at the very thought of killing their children after birth, deliberately destroy them previously. If there is any difference in the actual crime, we should be glad to have those who practice the latter, point it out. The truth of the matter is that it is just as much a murder to destroy life in its embryotic condition, as it is to destroy it after the fully developed form is attained, for it is the self-same life that is taken... Can anyone suggest a better than to so situate woman, that she may never be obligated to conceive a life she does not desire shall be continuous?

I once went to one of those parties where everyone throws their car keys into the middle of the room. I don’t know who got my moped but I’ve been driving that Peugeot for years.

I was just thinking as Alan [Bennett] and I walked up the steps, how nice it would have been if one of us had come up in a stairlift.