Top 60 Victoria Woodhull Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.”

— Victoria Woodhull

2. “The uses of government should be to foster, protect and promote the possession of equality.”

— Victoria Woodhull

3. “I do not intend to be made the scapegoat of sacrifice, to be offered up as a victim to society.”

— Victoria Woodhull

4. “I do not assume to speak for anyone. I know I speak in direct opposition to the wishes of many by whom I am surrounded.”

— Victoria Woodhull

5. “No man who respects his mother or loves his sister, can speak disparagingly of any woman; however low she may seem to have sunk, she is still a woman. I want every man to remember this. Every woman is, or, at some time, has been a sister or daughter...”

— Victoria Woodhull

6. “All talk of women’s rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them.”

— Victoria Woodhull

7. “I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.”

— Victoria Woodhull

8. “Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputations on the line in support of an idea or enterprise.”

— Victoria Woodhull

9. “I endeavor to make the most of everything.”

— Victoria Woodhull

10. “Every woman knows that if she were free, she would never bear an unwished-for child nor think of murdering one before its birth.”

— Victoria Woodhull

11. “Woman’s ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.”

— Victoria Woodhull

12. “I offer you the remedy of Free Love as an antidote for enforced lust, and the world will have to take it before the disease can be cured.”

— Victoria Woodhull

13. “The wife who submits to sexual intercourse against her wishes or desires, virtually commits suicide; while the husband who compels it, commits murder.”

— Victoria Woodhull

14. “I supposed that to marry was to be transported to a heaven not only of happiness but of purity and perfection.”

— Victoria Woodhull

15. “I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.”

— Victoria Woodhull

16. “The rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus.”

— Victoria Woodhull

17. “Woman, no less than man, can qualify herself for the more onerous occupations of life.”

— Victoria Woodhull

18. “There is something wrong with a government that makes women the legal property of their husbands. The whole system needs changing, but men will never make the changes. They have too much to lose.”

— Victoria Woodhull

19. “Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.”

— Victoria Woodhull

20. “The American nation, in its march onward and upward, can not publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half its citizens by narrow statutes.”

— Victoria Woodhull

21. “I believe in Spiritualism; I advocate free love in the highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the damnation by which men corrupt God’s most holy institution of sexual relations.”

— Victoria Woodhull

22. “There are none so ignorant but they may be taught. So, too, are there none so unfortunate in their understanding of the true and high relation of the sexes as not to be amenable to the right kind of instruction.”

— Victoria Woodhull

23. “Denounce me for advocating freedom if you can, and I will bear your curse with a better resignation.”

— Victoria Woodhull

24. “While others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it.”

— Victoria Woodhull

25. “It must always be remembered that you can never do right until you are first free to do wrong; since the doing of a thing under compulsion is evidence neither of good nor bad intent; and if under compulsion, who shall decide what would be the substituted rule of action under full freedom?”

— Victoria Woodhull

26. “So after all I am a very promiscuous free lover. I want the love of you all, promiscuously.”

— Victoria Woodhull

27. “It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.”

— Victoria Woodhull

28. “The women of the country have the power in their own hands, in spite of the law and the government being altogether of the male order.”

— Victoria Woodhull

29. “Women have no government.”

— Victoria Woodhull

30. “I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable I trust that my sincerity will not be called into question.”

— Victoria Woodhull

31. “When I found I had given birth to a human wreckage, to a child that was an imbecile, my heart was broken.”

— Victoria Woodhull

32. “When I first saw the light of day on this planet, it seemed as if I had been rudely awakened from a death-like sleep.”

— Victoria Woodhull

33. “The sin of all time has been the exercise of assumed powers. This is the essence of tyranny.”

— Victoria Woodhull

34. “By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?”

— Victoria Woodhull

35. “Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.”

— Victoria Woodhull

36. “Suffrage is a common right of citizenship. Women have the right of suffrage. Logically it cannot be escaped.”

— Victoria Woodhull

37. “You are all aware that my private life has been pictured to the public by the press of the country with the intent to make people believe me to be a very bad woman.”

— Victoria Woodhull

38. “My judges preach against free love openly, practice it secretly.”

— Victoria Woodhull

39. “I went with my husband and an innocent child to California. I went to a theatrical manager and asked him to allow me to earn money enough on the stage to buy our tickets home. He did.”

— Victoria Woodhull

40. “My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism.”

— Victoria Woodhull

41. “I imagined that the priestly ceremony was perfect sanctification, and that the sin of sins was for either husband or wife to be false to that relation.”

— Victoria Woodhull

42. “Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.”

— Victoria Woodhull

43. “Hundreds, thousands, aye, millions of human beings, men, women and children, wander the streets of our cities and the highways of our country, hungry, ragged and cold, vainly seeking in this land of plenty, where physical want should be unknown.”

— Victoria Woodhull

44. “If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.”

— Victoria Woodhull

45. “Strike as much and as hard as you please, only don’t do it in the dark so that I cannot know who is my enemy.”

— Victoria Woodhull

46. “Is it fair to treat a woman worse than a man, and then revile her because she is a woman?”

— Victoria Woodhull

47. “It is extremely unfortunate that an editor’s own life and practice should be notoriously at variance with his written principles.”

— Victoria Woodhull

48. “The spirits are coming back to tear your damned system of sexual slavery into tatters and consign its blackened remnants to the depth of everlasting hell.”

— Victoria Woodhull

49. “I shall make it my business to take my chances in the matter of libel suits.”

— Victoria Woodhull

50. “I do not shake hands from a sanitary standpoint.”

— Victoria Woodhull