Top 140 Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “A man in love will jump to pick up a glove or a bouquet for a silly girl of sixteen, whilst at home he will permit his aged mother to carry pails of water and armfuls of wood, or his wife to lug a twenty-pound baby, hour after hour, without ever offe.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

102. “The Church is a terrible engine of oppression, especially as concerns woman.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

103. “All honor to the noble women that have devoted earnest lives to the intellectual needs of mankind!”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

104. “No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

105. “Our ‘pathway’ is straight to the ballot box, with no variableness nor shadow of turning.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

106. “In youth our most bitter disappointments, our brightest hopes and ambitions, are known only to ourselves. Even our friendship and love we never fully share with another; there is something of every passion, in every situation, we conceal.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

107. “How can any woman believe that a loving and merciful God would, in one breath, command Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, and in the next, pronounce a curse upon her maternity? I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or gave out the laws about women which he is accused of doing.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

108. “I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals – grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to the unknown god.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

109. “That only a few, under any circumstances, protest against the injustice of long-established laws and customs, does not disprove the fact of the oppressions, while the satisfaction of the many, if real only proves their apathy and deeper degradation.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

110. “Among the clergy we find our most violent enemies, those most opposed to any change in woman’s position.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

111. “Women of all classes are awakening to the necessity of self-support, but few are willing to do the ordinary useful work for which they are fitted.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

112. “In her present ignorance, woman’s religion, instead of making her noble and free, by the wrong application of great principles ofright and justice, has made her bondage but more certain and lasting, her degradation more hopeless and complete.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

113. “I thought that the chief thing to be done in order to equal boys was to be learned and courageous. So I decided to study Greek and learn to manage a horse.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

114. “The strongest reason for giving woman all the opportunities for higher education, for the full development of her faculties, her forces of mind and body; for giving her the most enlarged freedom of thought and action; a complete emancipation from all forms of bondage, of custom, dependence, superstition; from all the crippling influences of fear – is the solitude and personal responsibility of her own individual life.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

115. “Well, another female child is born into the world! Last Sunday afternoon, Harriot Eaton Stanton – oh! the little heretic thus to desecrate that holy holiday – opened her soft blue eyes on this mundane sphere.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

116. “Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

117. “I had been invited to speak after the lunch. But I did not go to the table until the feast ended, as I never like to eat or talk before speaking.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

118. “I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

119. “The Bible contains some of the most sublime passages in English literature, but is also full of contradictions, inconsistencies, and absurdities.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

120. “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.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

121. “Men as a general rule have very little reverence for trees.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

122. “The memory of my own suffering has prevented me from ever shadowing one young soul with the superstition of the Christian religion.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

123. “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.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

124. “I think all these reverend gentlemen who insist on the word ‘obey’ in the marriage service should be removed for a clear violation of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Federal Constitution, which says there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude within the United States.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

125. “Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood, the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked God’s blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

126. “Woman has been the great unpaid laborer of the world.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

127. “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.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

128. “It is the inalienable right of all to be happy.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

129. “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.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

130. “It is impossible for one class to appreciate the wrongs of another.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

131. “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.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

132. “Without fear of contradiction, I can safely say that every step in progress that woman has made she has been assailed by ecclesiastics, that her most vigilant unwearied opponents have always been the clergy...”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

133. “So it ever must be in the conflicting scenes of life, in the long, weary march, each one walks alone. We may have many friends, love, kindness, sympathy and charity, to smooth our pathway in everyday life, but in the tragedies and triumphs of human experience, each mortal stands alone.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

134. “The women of this country ought be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they live, that they may no longer publish their degradation by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance, by asserting that they have all the rights they want.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

135. “Embrace truth as it is revealed to-day by human reason.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

136. “I view it as one of the greatest crimes to shadow the minds of the young with these gloomy superstitions, and with fears of the unknown and the unknowable to poison all their joy in life.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

137. “Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

138. “Oh, the shortcomings and inconsistency of the average human being, especially when this human being is a man trying to manage women’s affairs!”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

139. “The canon and civil law; church and state; priests and legislators; all political parties and religious denominations have alike taught that woman was made after man, of man, and for man, an inferior being, subject to man. Creeds, codes, Scriptures and statutes, are all based on this idea. The fashions, forms, ceremonies and customs of society, church ordinances and discipline all grow out of this idea.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

140. “Who can sum up all the ills the women of a nation suffer from war? They have all of the misery and none of the glory; nothing to mitigate their weary waiting and watching for the loved ones who return no more.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

141. “Our civil and criminal codes reflect at many points the spirit of the Mosaic. In the criminal code we find no feminine pronouns, as “He,” “His,” “Him,” we are arrested, tried and hung, but singularly enough, we are denied the highest privileges of citizens, because the pronouns “She,” “Hers” and “Her,” are not found in the constitutions. It is a pertinent question, if women can pay the penalties of their crimes as “He,” why may they not enjoy the privileges of citizens as “He”?”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

142. “All the men of the Old Testament were polygamists, and Christ and Paul, the central figures of the New Testament, were celibates, and condemned marriage by both precept and example.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

143. “It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman’s favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

144. “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.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

145. “Paul, in speaking of equality as the very soul and essence of Christianity, said, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”

— Elizabeth Cady Stanton

146. “To throw obstacles in the way of a complete education is like putting out the eyes; to deny the rights of property is like cutting off the hands. To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect; of credit in the market place; of recompense in the world of work, of a voice in choosing 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