If it is right for men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would be like today if men had not, since time began, fought for their freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the freedom of the children they bear.
We woman suffragists have a great mission – the greatest mission the world has ever known. It is to free half the human race, and through that freedom to save the rest.
Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.
Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress.
The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.
I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women’s hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.
You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under, if you are really going to get your reform realized.
Justice and judgment lie often a world apart.
Women had always fought for men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own human rights. Our militant movement was established.
There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion.
Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it.
The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.
I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my temperament and my surroundings, I could scarcely have been otherwise.
I have never advised the destruction of life, but of property, yes.
Our sons and daughters must be trained in national service, taught to give as well as to receive.
I had to get a close-hand view of the misery and unhappiness of a man made world, before I reached the point where I could successfully revolt against it.
What is the use of fighting for a vote if we have not got a country to vote in?
Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress. It is an added good fortune to have parents who take a personal part in the great movements of their time. I am glad and thankful that this was my case.
You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way.
As long as women consent to be unjustly governed, they will be; but directly women say: “We withhold our consent,” we will not be governed any longer as long as government is unjust.