Top 35 Nellie L. McClung Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People must know the past to understand the present and to face the future.”

— Nellie L. McClung

Featured in: Past Quotes

2. “Never underestimate the power of a woman.”

— Nellie L. McClung

3. “Never retract, never explain, never apologize; get things done and let them howl.”

— Nellie L. McClung

4. “No nation ever rises higher than its women...”

— Nellie L. McClung

5. “I want to leave something behind when I go; some small legacy of truth, some word that will shine in a dark place.”

— Nellie L. McClung

6. “Why are pencils equipped with erasers if not to correct mistakes?”

— Nellie L. McClung

7. “Children are great idealists, until the stupidity of their elders puts out the fires of the aspirations.”

— Nellie L. McClung

8. “Canada is destined to be one of the great nations of the world and Canadian women must be ready for citizenship.”

— Nellie L. McClung

9. “Women who set a low value of themselves make life hard for all women.”

— Nellie L. McClung

10. “Men alone are not capable of making laws for men and women.”

— Nellie L. McClung

11. “Women are going to form a chain, a greater sisterhood than the world has ever known.”

— Nellie L. McClung

12. “War is a crime committed by men and, therefore, when enough people say it shall not be, it cannot be.”

— Nellie L. McClung

13. “The middle years of life come on like thunder.”

— Nellie L. McClung

14. “I am a believer in women, in their ability to do things and in their influence and power. Women set the standards for the world, and it is for us, women in Canada, to set the standards high.”

— Nellie L. McClung

15. “War is the antithesis of all our teaching. It breaks all the commandments; it makes rich men poor, and strong men weak. It makes well men sick, and by it living men are changed to dead men.”

— Nellie L. McClung

16. “Have we not the brains to think? Hands to work? Hearts to feel? And lives to live?”

— Nellie L. McClung

17. “It is often true that those who sit in the wings can see more than the players.”

— Nellie L. McClung

18. “Chivalry is a poor substitute for justice, if one cannot have both. Chivalry is something like the icing on the cake, sweet but not nourishing.”

— Nellie L. McClung

19. “The economic dependence of women is perhaps the greatest injustice that has been done to us, and has worked the greatest injury to the race.”

— Nellie L. McClung

20. “A wound in a young heart is like a wound in a young tree. It does not grow out. It grows in.”

— Nellie L. McClung

21. “Disturbers are never popular – nobody ever really loved an alarm clock in action, no matter how grateful he may have been afterwards for its kind services!”

— Nellie L. McClung

22. “The good is the greatest rival of the best.”

— Nellie L. McClung

23. “Prohibition is a hard sounding word, worthless as a rallying cry, hard as a locked door or going to bed without your supper.”

— Nellie L. McClung

24. “Always in Alberta there is a fresh wind blowing.”

— Nellie L. McClung

25. “Women had first to convince the world that they had souls and then that they had minds and then it came on to this matter of political entity and the end is not yet...”

— Nellie L. McClung

26. “Humanity has to travel a hard road to wisdom, and it has to travel it with bleeding feet.”

— Nellie L. McClung

27. “That seems to be the haunting fear of mankind – that the advancement of women will sometime, someway, someplace, interfere with some man’s comfort.”

— Nellie L. McClung

28. “I saw what could be done with words, for I had a vision of a new world as I talked.”

— Nellie L. McClung

29. “The greatest insult came at the marriage ceremony when the minister asked ‘who giveth this woman,’ and some brother, or father or other man, unblushingly said he did, as though it were entirely a commercial transaction between men.”

— Nellie L. McClung

30. “I think this is the greatest and best country in all the world, with its great sunlit spaces and its long long roads, and best of all the roads that are not made yet, and the stories that no one has told because they are too busy living them.”

— Nellie L. McClung

31. “Chivalry is like a line of credit. You can get plenty of it when you do not need it.”

— Nellie L. McClung

32. “In regard to tenacity of life, no old yellow cat has anything on a prejudice. You may kill it with your own hands, bury it deep, and sit on the grave, and behold! the next day it will walk in at the back door, purring.”

— Nellie L. McClung

33. “I am one of those irritating people, who hang on to the door-knob after they say good-bye, and will neither come back nor go, always remembering something else which must be said...”

— Nellie L. McClung

34. “Literature may be light as a cobweb, but it must be fastened down to life at the four corners.”

— Nellie L. McClung

35. “The horse on the treadmill may be very discontented, but he is not disposed to tell his troubles, for he cannot stop to talk.”

— Nellie L. McClung

36. “The average reader can contemplate with considerable fortitude the sorrows and disappointments of someone else.”

— Nellie L. McClung

37. “Every season of life has its compensations...”

— Nellie L. McClung