Susan B. Anthony Quotes

“I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.”

— Susan B. Anthony

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

— Susan B. Anthony

“Our Job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make the ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Every woman should have a purse of her own.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Resistance to tyranny ius obedience to God”

— Susan B. Anthony

An oligarchy of race, where the Saxon rules the African, might be endured; but this oligarchy of sex which makes father, brothers, husband, sons, the oligarchs over the mother and sisters, the wife and daughters of every household ... carries discord and rebellion into every home of the nation.

— Susan B. Anthony

“She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“You would better educate ten women into the practice of liberal principles than to organize a thousand on a platform of intolerance and bigotry.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball - the further I am rolled the more I gain.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men's rights are nothing more. Women's rights are nothing less.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“No self-respecting woman should wish or work for the success of a party who ignores her sex.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“White men have always controlled their wives' wages. Colored men were not able to do so until they themselves became free. Then they owned both their wives and their wages.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“We shall some day be heeded, and when we shall have our amendment to the Constitution of the United States, everybody will think it was always so, just exactly as many young people believe that all the privileges, all the freedom, all the enjoyments which woman now possesses always were hers. They have no idea of how every single inch of ground that she stands upon today has been gained by the hard work of some little handful of women of the past.”

— Susan B. Anthony

The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God.

— Susan B. Anthony

Nothing is hopeless that is right.

— Susan B. Anthony

“Sweeter even than to have had the joy of caring for children of my own has it been to me to help bring about a better state of things for mothers generally, so their unborn little ones could not be willed away from them.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“To grant woman an equality with man in the affairs of life is contrary to every tradition, every precedent, every inheritance, every instinct and every teaching. The acceptance of this idea is possible only to those of especially progressive tendencies and a strong sense of justice, and it is yet too soon to expect these from the majority.”

— Susan B. Anthony

A woman growing up under American ideas of liberty in government and religion, having never blushed behind a Turkish mask, nor pressed her feet in Chinese shoes, cannot brook any disabilities based on sex alone, without a deep feeling of antagonism with the power that creates it.

— Susan B. Anthony

To be successful a person must attempt but one reform. By urging two, both are injured, as the average mind can grasp and assimilate but one idea at a time.

— Susan B. Anthony

Gentlemen, no one objects to the husband being the head of the wife as Christ was the head of the church
to crucify himself; whatwe object to is his crucifying his wife.

— Susan B. Anthony

“There never seems to be any difficulty in stretching the laws and the constitution to fit any kind of a political deal, but when it is proposed to make some concession to women they loom up like an unscalable wall.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“So long as State constitutions say that all may vote when twenty-one, save idiots, lunatics, convicts and women, you are brought down politically to the level of those others disfranchised.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“[Asked if American women would ever win full suffrage:] Assuredly. I firmly believed at one time that I should live to see that day. I have never for one moment lost faith. It will come but I shall not see itit is inevitable.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“When society is rightly organized, the wife and mother will have time, wish and will to grow intellectually, and will know that the limits of her sphere, the extent of her duties, are prescribed only by the measure of her ability.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Had I represented twenty thousand voters in Michigan, that political editor would not have known nor cared whether I was the oldest or the youngest daughter of Methuselah, or whether my bonnet came from the Ark or from Worth's.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Even if the right to vote brought to women no better work, no better pay, no better conditions in any way, she should have itfor her own self-respect and to compel man's respect for her.”

— Susan B. Anthony

Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.

— Susan B. Anthony

For a people is only as great, as free, as lofty, as advanced as its women are free, noble and progressive.

— Susan B. Anthony

“Current creation has exiled the turning wheel, and the same law of advancement makes the lady of today an alternate lady from her grandma.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the underlying principle of our Government, the right of consent, shall have practical application to the other half of people. Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be heeded.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“I hope there will be no effort to put up a shaft or any monument of that sort in memory of me or of the other women who have giventhemselves to our work. The best kind of a memorial would be a school where girls could be taught everything useful that would help them to earn an honorable livelihood; where they could learn to do anything they were capable of, just as boys can. I would like to have lived to see such a school as that in every great city of the United States.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Disfranchisement means inability to make, shape, or control one's own circumstances ... That is exactly the position of women in the world of work today; they cannot choose.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Marriage, to women as to men, must be a luxury, not a necessity; an incident of life, not all of it. And the only possible way to accomplish this great change is to accord to women equal power in the making, shaping and controlling of the circumstances of life.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“What words can express her [the white woman's] humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“I deplore the horrible crime as child murder ... no matter what the motive, love of ease, or desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent,the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed ... but oh, thrice guilty is he who drove her to the desperation which compelled her to the crime.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“Every generation of converts threshes over the same old straw.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“The men and women of the North are slaveholders, those of the South slaveowners. The guilt rests on the North equally with the South.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon. (on women's suffrage)”

— Susan B. Anthony

“While one-half of the people of the United States are robbed of their inherent right of personal representation in this freestcountry on the face of the globe, it is idle for us to expect that the men who thus rob women will not rob each other as individuals, corporations and Government.”

— Susan B. Anthony

We shall never become an immense power in the world until we concentrate all our money and editorial forces upon one great national daily newspaper, so we can sauce back our opponents every day in the year; once a month or once a week is not enough.

— Susan B. Anthony

“[Asked, upon the death of her fast friend and sister suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1816-1902), which period of their association she had enjoyed the most:] The days when the struggle was the hardest and the fight the thickest; when the whole world was against us and we had to stand the closer to each other; when I would go to her home and help with the children and the housekeeping through the day and then we would sit up far into the night preparing our ammunition and getting ready to move on the enemy. The years since the rewards began to come have brought no enjoyment like that.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“There is great fear expressed on all sides lest this war shall be made a war for the negro. I am willing that it shall be. It is awar to found an empire on the negro in slavery, and shame on us if we do not make it a war to establish the negro in freedom
against whom the whole nation, North and South, East and West, in one mighty conspiracy, has combined from the beginning.”

— Susan B. Anthony

“It has always been thought perfectly womanly to be a scrub- woman in the Legislature and to take care of the spittoons; that is entirely within the charmed circle of woman's sphere; but for women to occupy any of those official seats would be degrading.”

— Susan B. Anthony

I have known nothing the last thirty years save the struggle for human rights on this continent. If it had been a class of men whowere disfranchised and denied their legal rights, I believe I should have devoted my life precisely as I have done in behalf of my own sex.

— Susan B. Anthony