Sarah Moore Grimke Quotes

“An idea built the wall of separation between the sexes, and an idea will crumble it to dust ...”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“I ask no favors for my sex, I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“The virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“The reason why women effect so little and are so shallow is because their aims are low, marriage is the prize for which they strive; if foiled in that they rarely rise above disappointment.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

[Women] are early taught that to appear to yield is the only way to govern.

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“[On the Adam and Eve story:] They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“There has been a comparatively greater proportion of good queens, than of good kings.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“There is another way in which the general opinion, that women are inferior to men, is manifested ... I allude to the disproportionate value set on the time and labor of men and women.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“Whatsoever it is morally right for a man to do, it is morally right for a woman to do.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“[On the New Testament:] I ... must enter my protest against the false translation of some passages by the men who did that work, and against the perverted interpretation by the men who undertook to write commentaries thereon. I am inclined to think, when we [women] are admitted to the honor of studying Greek and Hebrew, we shall produce some various readings of the Bible a little different from those we now have.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“Good and evil, as we term them, are not antagonistic; they are ever found hand in hand. Humanity has never achieved a single conquest without the aid of both. Indeed how can she? What adds to moral strength, but a grappling with temptation?”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

In all ages, through all the varied experience of individuals and nations, knowledge has been the power which has civilized, elevated and dignified humanity. In those countries where progress has been most rapid, the thirst for knowledge has been most intense.

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“[Girls] study under the paralyzing idea that their acquirements cannot be brought into practical use. They may subserve the purposes of promoting individual domestic pleasure and social enjoyment in conversation, but what are they in comparison with the grand stimulation of independence and self- reliance, of the capability of contributing to the comfort and happiness of those whom they love as their own souls?”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“Is it not clear that to give to such women as desire it and can devote themselves to literary and scientific pursuits all the advantages enjoyed by men of the same class will lessen essentially the number of thoughtless, idle, vain and frivolous women and thus secure the [sic] society the services of those who now hang as dead weight?”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“I do deeply deplore, of the sake of the cause, the prevalent notion, that the clergy must be had, either by persuasion or by bribery. They will not need persuasion or bribery, if their hearts are with us; if they are not, we are better without them. It is idle to suppose that the kingdom of heaven cannot come on earth, without their cooperation.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“Oh, had I received the education I desired, had I been bred to the profession of the law, I might have been a useful member of society, and instead of myself and my property being taken care of, I might have been a protector of the helpless, a pleader for the poor and unfortunate.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“All history attests that man has subjected woman to his will, used her as a means to promote his selfish gratification, to minister to his sensual pleasures, to be instrumental in promoting his comfort; but never has he desired to elevate her to that rank she was created to fill. He has done all he could to debase and enslave her mind; and now he looks triumphantly on the ruin he has wrought, and say, the being he has thus deeply injured is his inferior.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“Fashionable women regard themselves, and are regarded by men, as pretty toys or as mere instruments of pleasure; and the vacuity of mind, the heartlessness, the frivolity which is the necessary result of this false and debasing estimate of women, can only be fully understood by those who have mingled in the folly and wickedness of fashionable life.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“Intellect is not sexed; ... strength of mind is not sexed; and ... our views about the duties of men and the duties of women, the sphere of man and the sphere of woman, are mere arbitrary opinions, differing in different ages and countries, and dependent solely on the will and judgment of erring mortals.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

One of the duties which devolve upon women in the present interesting crisis, is to prepare themselves for more extensive usefulness, by making use of those religious and literary privileges and advantages that are within their reach, if they will only stretch out their hands and possess them.

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“I want my sex to claim nothing from their brethren but what their brethren may justly claim from them.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“If the sewing societies, the avails of whose industry are now expended in supporting and educating young men for the ministry, were to withdraw their contributions to these objects, and give them where they are more needed, to their advancement of their own sex in useful learning, the next generation might furnish sufficient proof, that in intelligence and ability to master the whole circle of sciences, woman is not inferior to man.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“If the minds of women were enlightened and improved, the domestic work would be more frequently refreshed by intelligent conversation, a means of edification now deplorably neglected, for want of that cultivation which these intellectual advantages would confer.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“At sixty I look back on a life of deep disappointments, of withered hopes, of unlooked for suffering, of severe discipline.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke

“I know nothing of man's rights, or woman's rights; human rights are all that I recognize.”

— Sarah Moore Grimke