Suffrage Quotes - Page 5

• Few countries have produced such arrogance and snobbishness as America. Particularly is this true of the American woman of the middle class. She not only considers herself the equal of man, but his superior, especially in her purity, goodness, and morality. Small wonder that the American suffragist claims for her vote the most miraculous powers. In her exalted conceit she does not see how truly enslaved she is, not so much by man, as by her own silly notions and traditions. Suffrage can not ameliorate that sad fact; it can only accentuate it, as indeed it does.

  Emma Goldman

  Country, Silly, Men

  Emma Goldman (2016). “Anarchy and the Sex Question: Essays on Women and Emancipation, 1896–1926”, p.57, PM Press

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• ... woman does not see what people of intellect perceived fifty years ago: that suffrage is an evil, that it has only helped to enslave people, that it has but closed their eyes that they may not see how craftily they were made to submit.

  Emma Goldman

  Eye, Years, People

  Emma Goldman (2015). “Anarchism and Other Essays”, p.133, Sheba Blake Publishing

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• I used to oppose women's suffrage and I've come to support it because these women have convinced me that we need full gender equality for full democratic participation.

  Louis D. Brandeis

  Support, Needs, Women's Suffrage

  Source: www.slate.com

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• ... women learned one important lesson--namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women's feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement.... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder.

  Elizabeth Cady Stanton

  War, Men, Years

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• ... [woman suffrage] has made little difference beyond doubling the number of voters. There is no woman's vote as such. They divide up just about as men do.

  Alice Roosevelt Longworth

  Men, Differences, Numbers

  Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1935). “Crowded Hours: Reminiscences of Alice Roosevelt Longworth”

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• Do not stand in the way of the next step in human progress. No one living who reads the signs of the times but realizes that woman suffrage must come. We are working for the ballot as a matter of justice and as a step for human betterment.

  Carrie Chapman Catt

  Justice, Progress, Next Steps

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• It's not enough to have a few women's studies courses. Why is it more important to study Paul Revere's midnight ride than it is Susan B. Anthony's 50-year effort to transform the face of America for women? When you're in school, most of the events you study are about men. Men's activities lauded and repeated over and over. What about us? What about commemorating the decades-long struggle for suffrage? Why don't we hear those stories over and over and over again. It's almost inconceivable for men to understand what it would be like to live without that constant valorization.

  Judy Chicago

  Struggle, School, Men

  "Judy Chicago Is Connecting The Dots Of Feminist History, One Exhibition At A Time". Interview with Katherine Brooks, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 4, 2014.

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• The greatest human virtue bears no proportion to human vanity. We always think ourselves better than we are, and are generally desirous that others should think us still better than we think ourselves. To praise us for actions or dispositions which deserve praise is not to confer a benefit, but to pay a tribute. We have always pretensions to fame which, in our own hearts, we know to be disputable, and which we are desirous to strengthen by a new suffrage; we have always hopes which we suspect to be fallacious, and of which we eagerly snatch at every confirmation.

  Samuel Johnson

  Heart, Thinking, Vanity

  Samuel Johnson (1848). “The Wisdom of the Rambler, Adventurer, and Idler”, p.216

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• Reputation is but a synonym of popularity: dependent on suffrage, to be increased or diminished at the will of the voters.

  Washington Allston

  Voters, Reputation, Popularity

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• Above all things the mass-mind is most bitterly resentful of superiority. It will not tolerate the thought of an elite; and under a political system of universal suffrage, the mass-mind is enabled to make its antipathies prevail.

  Albert J. Nock

  Political, Mind, Mass

  "Memoirs of a Superfluous Man" by Albert J. Nock, (p. 88), 1943.

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• All governments use force and all assert that they are founded on reason. In fact, whether universal suffrage prevails or not, it is always an oligarchy that governs, finding ways to give to'the will of the people'the expression which the few desire.

  Vilfredo Pareto

  Government, Expression, People

  Quoted in Arthur Livingstone (ed) TheMind and Society (1935).

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• Universal suffrage is counter-revolution.

  Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Revolution, Universal Suffrage, Universal

  On Europe after the1848 revolution. Quoted in A J P Taylor From Napoleon to the Second International (1993).

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• We can neither change nor overpower God's eternal suffrage against selfishness and meanness.

  James Martineau

  Selfishness, Meanness, Eternal

  James Martineau (1879). “Hours of thought on sacred things, sermons”

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• The President of the United States of necessity owes his election to office to the suffrage and zealous labors of a political party, the members of which cherish with ardor and regard as of essential importance the principles of their party organization; but he should strive to be always mindful of the fact that he serves his party best who serves the country best.

  Rutherford B. Hayes

  Country, Party, Organization

  George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, James Knox Polk, Zachary Taylor, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James A. Garfield, Grover Cleveland, Benjamin Harrison, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Richard Milhous Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama (2017). “Inaugural Speeches from the Presidents of the United States - Complete Edition”, p.139, e-artnow sro

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• I go for all sharing the privileges of the government who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage who pay taxes or bear arms, by no means excluding females.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Mean, Government, Female

  Abraham Lincoln (2012). “The Complete Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln (Biographically Annotated Edition)”, p.144, Jazzybee Verlag

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• If the lesser mind could measure the greater as a foot-rule can measure a pyramid, there would be finality in universal suffrage. As it is, the political problem remains unsolved.

  George Bernard Shaw

  Pyramids, Feet, Political

  George Bernard Shaw (2015). “The Collected Works of George Bernard Shaw: Plays, Novels, Articles, Letters and Essays: Pygmalion, Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, Arms and The Man, Man and Superman, Caesar and Cleopatra, Androcles And The Lion, The New York Times Articles on War, Memories of Oscar Wilde and more”, p.4484, e-artnow

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• A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! ... Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the people or the feminine, works in favor of universal suffrage, i.e. the domination of the inferior men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.

  Friedrich Nietzsche

  War, Men, Light

  "The Will to Power" by Friedrich Nietzsche. Sec. 864 (Notebook W II 5. Spring 1888, KGW VIII, 3.157-62, KSA 13.365-70), 1888.

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• So firm did Nivea's determination become that she wrote in her diary that she would give up marriage in order to devote herself completely to the struggle for women's suffrage. She was not aware that such a sacrifice would not be necessary, and that she would marry a man for love who would back her up in her political goals.

  Isabel Allende

  Love, Determination, Giving Up

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• White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage.

  Carrie Chapman Catt

  White, Women's Suffrage, Supremacy

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• That elections of members to serve as representatives of the people, in assembly, ought to be free; and that all men, having sufficient evidence of permanent common interest with, and attachment to, the community, have the right of suffrage, and cannot be taxed or deprived of their property for public uses, without their own consent, or that of their representives so elected, nor bound by any law to which they have not, in like manner, assembled, for the public good.

  George Mason

  Men, Law, People

  "The Federal and State Constitutions Colonial Charters, and Other Organic Laws of the States, Territories, and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America" compiled and edited by Newton Thorpe, Washington, DC : Government Printing Office, 1909.

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• 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

  Atheist, Fighting, Years

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• Meiklejohn's position is that free speech in a democracy is not an absolute flowing from the boundless source of some presumed 'natural right.' It is a practical necessity of 'self-government by universal suffrage,' for if the citizens are not permitted to argue out the issues of government, how can they be what they must be in a democracy - the rulers as well as the ruled?

  Max Lerner

  Issues, Government, Self

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• 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.

  Emmeline Pankhurst

  Race, Half, World

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• For two generations groups of women have given their lives and their fortunes to secure the vote for the sex and hundreds of thousands of other women are now giving all the time at their command. No class of men in our own or any other country has made one-tenth the effort nor sacrificed one-tenth as much for the vote.

  Carrie Chapman Catt

  Country, Sex, Men

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• it was the United States which first established general suffrage for men upon the two principles that 'taxation without representation is tyranny' and that governments to be just should 'derive their consent from the governed.' The unanswerable logic of these two principles is responsible for the extension of suffrage to men and women the world over. In the United States, however, women are still taxed without 'representation' and still live under a government to which they have given no 'consent.

  Carrie Chapman Catt

  Men, Two, Justice

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