No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims...
You who have read the history of nations, from Moses down to our last election, where have you ever seen one class looking after the interests of another?
Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women’s affairs!
To think that all in me of which my father would have felt proper pride had I been a man, is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman.
Resolved, That all laws which prevent women from occupying such a station in society as her conscience shall dictate, or which place her in a position inferior to that of man, are contrary to the great precept of nature, and therefore of no force or authority.
All who live to a good old age have a genius for sleep.
The great fault of mankind is that it will not think.
What an infernal set of fools those schoolmarms must be! Well, if in order to please men they wish to live on air, let them. The sooner the present generation of women dies out, the better. We have idiots enough in the world now without such women propagating any more.
Everyone in the full enjoyment of all the blessings of his life, in his normal condition, feels some individual responsibility forthe poverty of others. When the sympathies are not blunted by any false philosophy, one feels reproached by one’s own abundance.
I see by the papers that you have once more stirred that pool of intellectual stagnation, the educational convention.
The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of thecompass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer.
When lions paint pictures men will not always be represented as conquerors. When women translate laws, constitutions, bibles and philosophies, man will not always be the declared heard of the church, the state, and the home.
I have met few men in my life, worth repeating eight times.
The moral qualities are more apt to grow when a human being is useful, and they increase in the woman who helps to support the family rather than in the one who gives herself to idleness and fashionable frivolities.
Whatever oppressions man has suffered, they have invariably fallen more heavily on woman. Whatever new liberties advancing civilization has brought to man, ever the smallest measure has been accorded to woman, as a result of church teaching. The effect of this is seen in every department of life.
It is as disastrous to true government in the state, and home, to teach all womankind to submit to the authority of man, as divinely ordained, as it is to teach all mankind to bow down to the authority of kings and Popes, as divinely ordained.
Modesty and taste are questions of latitude and education; the more people know, – the more their ideas are expanded by travel, experience, and observation, – the less easily they are shocked. The narrowness and bigotry of women are the result of their circumscribed sphere of thought and action.
How anyone, in view of the protracted sufferings of the race, can invest the laws of the universe with a tender loving fatherly intelligence, watching, guiding and protecting humanity, is to me amazing.
To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.
The girl must early be impressed with the idea that she is to be “a hand, not a mouth”; a worker, and not a drone, in the great hive of human activity. Like the boy, she must be taught to look forward to a life of self-dependence, and early prepare herself for some trade or profession.