Top 140 Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “No matter how much women prefer to lean, to be protected and supported, nor how much men desire to have them do so, they must make the voyage of life alone, and for safety in an emergency they must know something of the laws of navigation.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

52. “The Bible and the Church have been the greatest stumbling blocks in the way of women’s emancipation.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

53. “When women can support themselves, have entry to all the trades and professions, with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

54. “The queens in history compare favorably with the kings.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

55. “The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

56. “I know of no other book that so fully teaches the subjection and degradation of women.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

57. “Reformers who are always compromising, have not yet grasped the idea that truth is the only safe ground to stand upon.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

58. “Only those who have lived all their lives under the dark clouds of vague, undefined fears can appreciate the joy of a doubting soul suddenly born into the kingdom of reason and free thought.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

59. “A mind always in contact with children and servants, whose aspirations and ambitions rise no higher than the roof that shelters it, is necessarily dwarfed in its proportions.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

60. “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.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

61. “To no form of religion is woman indebted for one impulse of freedom, as all alike have taught her inferiority and subjection.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

62. “Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

63. “Woman’s discontent increases in exact proportion to her development.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

64. “Every truth we see is one to give to the world, not to keep to ourselves alone.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

65. “The religious superstitions of women perpetuate their bondage more than all other adverse influences.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

66. “I have met few men in my life, worth repeating eight times.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

67. “The great fault of mankind is that it will not think.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

68. “To-day the woman is Mrs. Richard Roe, to-morrow Mrs. John Doe, and again Mrs. James Smith according as she changes masters, and she has so little self-respect that she does not see the insult of the custom.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

69. “To deny political equality is to rob the ostracised of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work; of a voice among those who make and administer the law; a choice in the jury before whom they are tried, and in the judge who decides their punishment.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

70. “One remarkable fact stands out in the history of witchcraft; and that is, its victims were chiefly women. Scarce one wizard to a hundred witches was ever burned or tortured.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

71. “Two pure souls fused into one by an impassioned love-friends, counselors-a mutual support and inspiration to each other amid life’s struggles, must know the highest human happiness;-this is marriage; and this is the only cornerstone of an enduring home.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

72. “All who live to a good old age have a genius for sleep.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

73. “To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

74. “I shall not grow conservative with age.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

75. “You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

76. “The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

77. “Though motherhood is the most important of all the professions – requiring more knowledge than any other department in human affairs – there was no attention given to preparation for this office.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

78. “Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

79. “I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

80. “I see by the papers that you have once more stirred that pool of intellectual stagnation, the educational convention.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

81. “We cannot accept any code or creed that uniformly defrauds woman of all her natural rights.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

82. “How long will the heathens rage?”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

83. “Let us remember that all reforms are interdependent, and that whatever is done to establish one principle on a solid base, strengthens all.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

84. “The desire to please those we admire and respect often cripples conscience.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

85. “Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world. No one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

86. “Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

87. “Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

88. “We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

89. “To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all laws into contempt.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

90. “I poured out the torrent of my long-standing discontent and I challenged them to do and dare anything.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

91. “The whole tone of Church teaching in regard to women is, to the last degree, contemptuous and degrading.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

92. “The great lesson that nature seems to teach us at all ages is self-dependence, self-protection, self-support. In the hours of our keenest sufferings all are thrown wholly on themselves for consolation.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

93. “It is in vain to look for the elevation of woman so long as she is degraded in marriage.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

94. “It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

95. “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.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

96. “To live for a principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are to be lifted up to be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

97. “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?”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

98. “The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

99. “To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

100. “Men who can, when they wish to write a document, shut themselves up for days with their thoughts and their books, know little of what difficulties a woman must surmount to get off a tolerable production.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton