Susan B Anthony Quotes

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 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.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel…the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these.

Woman must not depend upon the protection of man, but must be taught to protect herself.

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.

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

I was born a heretic. I always distrusted people who know so much about what God wants them to do to their fellows.

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.

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

It was we, the people, not we, the white male citizens, nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union.” —Susan B. Anthony

Failure is Impossible

I pray every single moment of my life; not on my knees but with my work. My prayer is to lift women to equality with men. Work and worship are one with me.

Our Job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make the ungrateful so they keep going. Gratitude never radicalized anybody

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation, and publicly and privately, in season and out, avow their sympathy with despised and persecuted ideas and their advocates, and bear the consequences...

There shall never be another season of silence until women have the same rights men have on this green earth.

Every woman should have a purse of her own.

The true republic: men, their rights and nothing more: women, their rights and nothing less.

When a man says to me, 'Let us work together in the great cause you have undertaken, and let me be your companion and aid, for I admire you more than I have ever admired any other woman,' then I shall say, 'I am yours truly'; but he must ask me to be his equal, not his slave.

Resistance to tyranny ius obedience to God

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

In 1896 the newspaperwoman Nellie Bly asked Susan B. Anthony if she’d ever been in love. Her answer: “Bless you, Nellie, I’ve been in love a thousand times! But I never loved any one so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man’s housekeeper.

Independence is happiness.

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

It would be ridiculous to talk of male and female atmospheres, male and female springs or rains, male and female sunshine.... how much more ridiculous is it in relation to mind, to soul, to thought, where there is as undeniably no such thing as sex, to talk of male and female education and of male and female schools. [written with Elizabeth Cady Stanton]

Susan B. Anthony. “I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,” she once said, “because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.

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

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel.

I was planning to sort my comic books based on level of second wave feminist influence.” “As opposed to first wave?” “Yes, well, Susan B. Anthony laid the foundation for those who have come after. It’s all really interrelated but she didn’t have direct influence over late twentieth century comics.

I was born a heretic. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires. Susan B. Anthony, U.S. reformer and suffragist

The one distinct feature of our Association has been the right of the individual opinion for every member. We have been beset at every step with the cry that somebody was injuring the cause by the expression of some sentiments that differed with those held by the majority of mankind. The religious persecution of the ages has been done under what was claimed to be the command of God. I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do to their fellows, because it always coincides with their own desires.

There is not a woman born who desires to eat the bread of dependence, no matter whether it be from the hand of father, husband, or brother; for anyone who does so eat her bread places herself in the power of the person from whom she takes it.

Are you going to cater to the whims and prejudices of people who have no intelligent knowledge of what they condemn?

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

Solitude is independence. -Hermann Hesse Independence is happiness. -Susan B. Anthony Happiness is having your own library card. -Sally Brown, Peanuts

Our pioneers gave us a head start. They prepared us to fight many battles for decades to come as they left the map for us to continue on the path of their greatness. As quoted by the great Susan B. Anthony, “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.” The shade of our skin might be a bit darker or lighter, but we share the same rejections and discriminations as we are treated unfairly because we are women. Our religions might very well be different; however, we share the same identity, being females productively working for change for a greater cause.

Many social justice or social activist movements have been rooted in a position. A position is usually against something. Any position will call up its opposition. If I say up, it generates down. If I say right, it really creates left. If I say good, it creates bad. So a position creates its opposition. A stand is something quite distinct from that. There are synonyms for “stand” such as “declaration” or “commitment,” but let me talk for just a few moments about the power of a stand. A stand comes from the heart, from the soul. A stand is always life affirming. A stand is always trustworthy. A stand is natural to who you are. When we use the phrase “take a stand” I’m really inviting you to un-cover, or “unconceal,” or recognize, or affirm, or claim the stand that you already are. Stand-takers are the people who actually change the course of history and are the source of causing an idea’s time to come. Mahatma Gandhi was a stand-taker. He took a stand so powerful that it mobilized millions of people in a way that the completely unpredictable outcome of the British walking out of India did happen. And India became an independent nation. The stand that he took… or the stand that Martin Luther King, Jr. took or the stand that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony took for women’s rights—those stands changed our lives today. The changes that have taken place in history as a result of the stand-takers are permanent changes, not temporary changes. The women in this room vote because those women took so powerful a stand that it moved the world. And so the opportunity here is for us to claim the stand that we already are, not take a position against the macro economic system, or a position against this administration, although some of you may have those feelings. What’s way more powerful than that is taking a stand, which includes all positions, which allows all positions to be heard and reconsidered, and to begin to dissolve. When you take a stand, it actually does shift the whole universe and unexpected, unpredictable things happen.

One merely had to imagine a woman candidate doing what Trump did, from lying to leering, to understand what latitude masculinity possesses. "No advanced step take by women has been so bitterly contested as that of speaking in public," Susan B. Anthony said in 1900. "For nothing which they have attempted, not even to secure the suffrage, have they been so abused, condemned and antagonized." Or as Mary Beard put it last year, "We have never escaped a certain male cultural desire for women's silence.

From "Not For Ourselves Alone:" In Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s time: Women were barred by custom from the pulpit and professions Those who spoke in public were thought indecent Married women were prohibited from owning or inheriting property: in fact, wives were the property of their husbands, who were entitled by law to her wages and her body. Women were prohibited from signing contracts Women had no right to their children or even their clothing in a divorce Women were not allowed to serve on juries and most were considered incompetent to testify. Women were not allowed to VOTE.

Failure is impossible” - Susan B. Anthony

We are never forced to consider that rage—and not just stoicism, sadness, or strength—were behind the actions of the few women’s heroes we’re ever taught about in school, from Harriet Tubman to Susan B. Anthony. Instead, we are regularly fed and we regularly ingest cultural messages that suggest that women’s rage is irrational, dangerous, or laughable.

Many of the same people who are crying for mankind to tolerate everything have overlooked examples of intolerance that have utterly reshaped the country in which we live. For instance, what would this country be like if George Washington had tolerated British troops? Where would we be today if Thomas Jefferson had tolerated King George III? Or what if Fredrick Douglas had tolerated slavery, or Martin Luther King Jr. had tolerated segregation? What would America be like if Winston Churchill had tolerated Adolf Hitler or if Susan B. Anthony tolerated only men voting? Part of what made these individuals great was that they were strong enough to stand up for their convictions. They recognized something as “wrong,” and they didn’t tolerate it.

Western women may well be recognized as equals of men, but in many parts of the world, brave suffragettes, counterparts to Susan B. Anthony, are still fiercely fighting for their equality. A deep disconnect exists between the feminists in the Western countries and the feminists in the Muslim-majority countries. ... I don't have to refer to a history book to find women who are risking their lives to fight societies that view women as second-class citizens. I interact with them everyday. Yet, tragically, most prominent Western feminists are not standing alongside me and these brave freedom-fighting women.

Some June, for instance, when the rigors of the academic year are over, I would like to invite the women's studies scholars I know to a banquet where we would cook and serve things like Emily Dickinson's bread and Elizabeth Cady Stanton's pudding (the kind she was always asking Susan B. Anthony to cook for her so that she had time to write a speech).

Henry David Thoreau, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. DuBois, and Lyndon B. Johnson are just a few of the famous Americans who taught. They resisted the fantasy of educators as saints or saviors, and understood teaching as a job in which the potential for children’s intellectual transcendence and social mobility, though always present, is limited by real-world concerns such as poor training, low pay, inadequate supplies, inept administration, and impoverished students and families. These teachers’ stories, and those of less well-known teachers, propel this history forward and help us understand why American teaching has evolved into such a peculiar profession, one attacked and admired in equal proportion.

Failure is Impossible."--Susan B. Anthony in The Renegade Queen

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

When I was young if a girl married poor, she became a housekeeper and a drudge. If she married wealthy, she became a pet and a doll. —Susan B. Anthony A

Unification is the very soul of dharma. We see it in every life we’ve studied during this entire project. Thoreau streamlined his life in order to free his inner mystic. Frost became a farmer who farmed poetry. Goodall organized her life around her chimps. The degree of unification that you accomplish is the degree to which you’re doing your dharma. “How we spend our days,” says author Annie Dillard, “is, of course, how we spend our lives.” Once the mature Susan B. Anthony had fully organized her life around her dharma, she declared, as I have said, “Failure is impossible.” She had grasped the central principle: As long as you are living your dharma fully—unified!—you cannot fail. Indeed, you have already succeeded.

Frisland is a country that's so powerful it had itself removed off all world maps, so it could stealthily gain influence. It has an ancient ruler named King Anthony, better known as Susan B. Anthony. Susan really do be Anthony. King Anthony began to reign over Frisland just as soon as Susan B. Anthony "died." At first, King Anthony was kept alive through crude cloning techniques, but over the last century, technology has advanced so far that now King Anthony exists as a spirit embedded in a hologram.

The July 1848 Seneca Falls women’s rights convention—brought about by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, among others—issued a “Declaration of Sentiments and Resolutions” that sanctified a movement’s creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” The italics are mine; the vision the suffragists’. Susan B. Anthony, an essential figure, echoed the point down the years: “It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed this Union,” she said in 1873 after she illegally cast a ballot for U. S. Grant for president. “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.

be realized when, in 1937, I introduced him in New York City, to Colonel Boris Bykov. At St. Matthews Court, Collins lived alone. He was separated from his wife (he has since married Susan B. Anthony III). He had a son about ten years old whom I met once when he was visiting his father (on some holiday

Sooner or later we all discover that the important moments in life are not the advertised ones, not the birthdays, the graduations, the weddings, not the great goals achieved. The real milestones are less prepossessing. They come to the door of memory unannounced, stray dogs that amble in, sniff around a bit and simply never leave. Our lives are measured by these. —Susan B. Anthony

When Gloria Steinem marched in the streets to fight for the opportunities that so many of us now take for granted, she quoted Susan B. Anthony, who marched in the streets before her and concluded, “Our job is not to make young women grateful. It is to make them ungrateful so they keep going.”27 The sentiment remains true today. We need to be grateful for what we have but dissatisfied with the status quo. This dissatisfaction spurs the charge for change. We must keep going.

Married to a naval commander who happened to be Benjamin Franklin’s great-great-grandson, Wainwright prayed to the graven image of Lafayette, since neither the president nor Congress seemed to be listening. “We, the women of the United States,” she told the bronze Lafayette, “denied the liberty which you helped to gain, and for which we have asked in vain for sixty years, turn to you to plead for us. Speak, Lafayette, dead these hundred years but still living in the hearts of the American people.” She beseeched the inanimate Frenchman, “Let that outstretched hand of yours pointing to the White House recall to him”—President Wilson—“his words and promises, his trumpet call for all of us, to see that the world is made safe for democracy. As our army now in France spoke to you there, saying here we are to help your country fight for liberty, will you not speak here and now for us, a little band with no army, no power but justice and right, no strength but in our Constitution and in the Declaration of Independence; and win a great victory again in this country by giving us the opportunity we ask—to be heard through the Susan B. Anthony amendment.” She then echoed the words uttered by the American officer in Paris on July 4, 1917. “Lafayette,” she said, “we are here!

When Susan B. Anthony began earning a salary as an elementary school teacher, at twenty-six, she had already turned down two marriage proposals in her quest to remain unmarried. She purchased for herself a fox-fur muff, a white silk hat, and a purple wool dress and wrote home, wondering if her peers might not “feel rather sad because they are married and can not have nice clothes.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world . . . It gives [a] woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance . . . The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle . . . Susan B. Anthony, social reformer, 1896

Andrew Jackson II had hurried away from the smoking wreckage of Susan B. Anthony III's mansion with Queen Victoria XXX inferno-like on his heels. They had continued south for miles, racing by the heaped corpses and cannibalistic social reformers of Old Maryland. Every so often, the cloned president would turn and throw a rock or a skull wildly at the reincarnated queen, but he knew he was outmatched. A righteous Vicky was only slightly less dangerous than a vengeful one, but a Vicky running on dinosaur blood and non-lethal doses of atomic energy... Holy shit. Andrew Jackson II was screwed.

Solitude is independence. -Hermann Hesse Independence is happiness. -Susan B. Anthony Happiness is having your own library card. -Sally Brown, Peanuts” ― Abbi Waxman, The Bookish Life of Nina Hill

Woman” was the test, but not every woman seemed to qualify. Black women, of course, were virtually invisible within the protracted campaign for woman suffrage. As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage. Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton persuaded several female labor leaders to protest the disfranchisement of women, the masses of working women were far too concerned about their immediate problems—wages, hours, working conditions—to fight for a cause that seemed terribly abstract.

Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Gandhi, King, Havel, Mandela, and many other memorable leaders have found in righteous indignation the psychological edge they needed to endure years of doubt and trial. However, such an emotion is not something everyone can control, and it has, when unleashed, enough destructive energy to turn grand potential to failure.

Emboldened by her first public act of defiance, Anthony organized a protest meeting, to which she pointedly invited only women—and also (one of her secret weapons throughout her life) the press. At the press conference, she announced that the protesting women would form their own independent organization. “We are heartily sick and tired of the round of demeaning encomiums which Gentlemen Temperance lecturers are pleased to lavish upon our sex,” she exclaimed. And so, Susan B. Anthony’s first organization, The Women’s State Temperance Society, was born. Anthony did not stop there. She was on a roll: She immediately called a national Women’s Temperance convention.

Lynn Sherr. Failure Is Impossible: Susan B. Anthony in Her Own Words. Times Books: Toronto, 1995,

Geoffrey C. Ward. Not for Ourselves Alone: The Story of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony—An Illustrated History. Knopf: New York, 1999.

Kathleen Barry. Susan B. Anthony: A Biography of a Singular Feminist. First Books: Bloomington, IN, 2000,

Of course, with my luck, the Shepherd could be a crazy numismatist just dying for a Kennedy fifty-cent piece. Maybe I could set a trap with a handful of change. Here, Shepherd, here boy, look, I have a Susan B. Anthony dollar, you know you want it.

Susan B. Anthony once said that woman must not depend on the protection of man, but be taught to protect herself.” “I

Men tend to rebel when young and become more conservative with age, but women tend to be more conservative when young and become rebellious as we grow older. I’d noticed this pattern in the suffragist/ abolitionist era, when women over fifty, sixty, even seventy were a disproportionate number of the activists and leaders—think of Sojourner Truth and Susan B. Anthony, or Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ida B. Wells—but I’d assumed it was due to the restrictions placed on younger women by uncontrolled childbirth and their status as household chattel: hard facts that limited all but a few single or widowed white women, and all but even fewer free women of color.

have assembled a partial list: Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West; Peter Kolchin, American Slavery: 1619–1877; Henry Louis Gates Jr., Stony the Road: Reconstruction, White Supremacy, and the Rise of Jim Crow; Tina Cassidy, Mr. President, How Long Must We Wait?: Alice Paul, Woodrow Wilson, and the Fight for the Right to Vote; Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63; and Annette Gordon-Reed, On Juneteenth. I would also recommend reading writings by or about some of the pivotal figures in the fight for political equality, such as Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Susan B. Anthony, and Martin Luther King Jr.

In England, the movement had been much more violent. But Katrina, along with her fellow activists in America, had chosen to pursue a more peaceful path. So far it had mostly worked, but women were getting tired. Tired of the fact that since Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton had begun this movement in 1852, it was still ongoing. Here they were in 1915, and they still had to protest and fight and explain and cajole. They still had to put up with archaic notions that women were second-class citizens, incapable of figuring out for whom to cast their vote. Or as Charles had said at breakfast, they were fragile and needed protecting. Fragile, my foot, Katrina thought, and gave a deep sigh.

Nellie Bly: “What do you think the new woman will be?” Susan B. Anthony: “She’ll be free.” —1896

I never loved anyone so much that I thought it would last. In fact, I never felt I could give up my life of freedom to become a man's housekeeper. (Susan B. Anthony being interviewed by Nellie Bly)

The industrial upheavals of our time have exposed the unjust limitations placed upon women. We must unite and demand not only the ballot but also a redefinition of our roles and rights in this changing society.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world . . . It gives [a] woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance . . . The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle . . . Susan B. Anthony, social reformer, 1896 Chapter One Berlin, November 1891 Barnim Road Women’s Prison Josephine looked around anxiously.

Given that (a) early feminists were steadfastly opposed to censorship and abortion, and (b) modern feminists are steadfastly committed to censorship and abortion, is it fair to say the feminist movement has lost its way? In other words, Diane, why can't you be more like Susan B. Anthony?

Susan B. Anthony should not, of course, be held personally responsible for the suffrage movement’s racist errors. But she was the movement’s most outstanding leader at the turn of the century—and her presumably “neutral” public posture toward the fight for Black equality did indeed bolster the influence of racism within the NAWSA. Had Anthony seriously reflected on the findings of her friend Ida B. Wells, she might have realized that a noncommittal stand on racism implied that lynchings and mass murders by the thousands could be considered a neutral issue.

In light of the widespread violence and terror suffered by Black people in the South, Frederick Douglass’ insistence that Black people’s need for electoral power was more urgent than that of middle-class white women was logical and compelling. The former slave population was still locked in a struggle to defend their lives—and in Douglass’ eyes, only the ballot could ensure their victory. By contrast, the white middle-class women, whose interests were represented by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, could not claim that their lives were in physical jeopardy. They were not, like Black men and women in the South, engaged in an actual war for liberation.

Steve Jobs, who said, “We’re here to put a dent in the universe. Otherwise, why else even be here?” • Susan B. Anthony, who worked tirelessly for decades in support of women’s right to vote. She was often derided and even arrested. A woman’s right to vote was ratified four years after her death. • John F. Kennedy, who initiated the mission to the moon and said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

Suffragist Susan B. Anthony introduced her as a living legend at the twenty-eighth annual convention of the New York State Women’s Suffrage Association, held in 1904.

Responding to Susan B. Anthony’s temperance work in 1853, the New York Sun published a screed noting that, “The quiet duties of daughter, wife or mother are not congenial to those hermaphrodite spirits who thirst to win the title of champion of one sex and victor over the other.” The imagined connection between social agitation and an unmarried state was so firm that even married activists got tarred as single, frigid, or unmarriageable.

Solitude is independence. —HERMANN HESSE Independence is happiness. —SUSAN B. ANTHONY Happiness is having your own library card. —SALLY BROWN, PEANUTS

I forged the thunderbolts and she fired them," is how [Elizabeth Cady] Stanton described their [hers and Susan B. Anthony's] work together.

Let me tell you what I think of bicycling,” Susan B. Anthony had said to Nellie Bly as the journalist interviewed the suffragette for an article published in the February 2nd, 1896, Sunday edition of the New York World. “It has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world.

As for white working-class women, the suffrage leaders were probably impressed at first by the organizing efforts and militancy of their working-class sisters. But as it turned out, the working women themselves did not enthusiastically embrace the cause of woman suffrage. Although Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton persuaded several female labor leaders to protest the disfranchisement of women, the masses of working women were far too concerned about their immediate problems—wages, hours, working conditions—to fight for a cause that seemed terribly abstract. ... As working women knew all too well, their fathers, brothers, husbands and sons who exercised the right to vote continued to be miserably exploited by their wealthy employers. Political equality did not open the door to economic equality.

My feminism begins not with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton showing out at Seneca Falls, but with Maria Stewart, a Black lady abolitionist, who was schooling audiences of men and women, Black and white, in Boston in the 1830s.

Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton joined up in the late 1860s to fight for a woman’s right to vote. But they also lobbied for a woman’s right to education and divorce. Stanton, in particular, was an advocate of “voluntary motherhood,” the right of a wife to say no to her husband and choose periodic abstinence. Allowing a woman a voice in a couple’s relationship was empowering and groundbreaking in itself. She also believed in “the sacred right of a woman to her own person,” including the right to have fewer children.

Failure is Impossible

Susan B. Anthony. Also, Susan be Anthony, now that she had a sex change.