35 Empowering Susan B. Anthony Quotes About Strength

Failure is impossible.

Independence is happiness.

I declare to you that woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself, and there I take my stand.

I think the girl who is able to earn her own living and pay her own way should be as happy as anybody on earth. The sense of independence and security is very sweet.

Forget conventionalisms; forget what the world thinks of you stepping out of your place; think your best thoughts, speak your best words, work your best works, looking to your own conscience for approval.

She who succeeds in gaining the mastery of the bicycle will gain the mastery of life.

I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence.

The principle of self-government cannot be violated with impunity. The individual’s right to it is sacred – regardless of class, caste, race, color, sex or any other accident or incident of birth.

No man is good enough to govern any woman without her consent.

The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball – the further I am rolled the more I gain.

I do not demand equal pay for any women save those who do equal work in value. Scorn to be coddled by your employers; make them understand that you are in their service as workers, not as women.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputations and social standing, never can bring about a reform.

I have encountered riotous mobs and have been hung in effigy, but my motto is: Men’s rights are nothing more. Women’s rights are nothing less.

This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then but they were not roses.

Trust me that as I ignore all law to help the slave, so will I ignore it all to protect an enslaved woman.

I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do, because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

I shall earnestly and persistently continue to urge all women to the practical recognition of the old Revolutionary maxim. Resistance to tyranny is obedience to God.

You are not laughing at me; you are treating me respectfully, because you are hearing my argument; you are not asleep, not one of you, and I am delighted.

I do not care where we stand with the women! We have been getting them for fifty years. We are after the men now. Men have the vote, and it is all nonsense to refer me back to the women.

I had barked up the temperance tree, and I’d barked up the teachers’ tree and I couldn’t do anything. I had learned where our only hope rested. I got petitions signed for property laws and for suffrage.

I don’t want to die as long as I can work; the minute I can not, I want to go.

To think, I have had more than 60 years of hard struggle for a little liberty, and then to die without it seems so cruel.

Oh, if I could but live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women! There is so much yet to be done.

Men, their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less.

Organize, agitate, educate, must be our war cry.

Join the union, girls, and together say Equal Pay for Equal Work.

There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.

Suffrage is the pivotal right.

Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!

The only question left to be settled now is: Are women persons? And I hardly believe any of our opponents will have the hardihood to say they are not.

Being persons, then, women are citizens; and no state has a right to make any new law, or to enforce any old law, that shall abridge their privileges or immunities.

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union. And we formed it, not to give the blessings of liberty, but to secure them; not to the half of ourselves and the half of our posterity, but to the whole people – women as well as men.

It is downright mockery to talk to women of their enjoyment of the blessings of liberty while they are denied the use of the only means of securing them provided by this democratic-republican government: the ballot.

Resolved, that the women of this nation in 1876, have greater cause for discontent, rebellion and revolution than the men of 1776.