Lucy Stone Quotations

I think, with never-ending gratitude, that the young women of today do not and can never know at what price their right to free speech and to speak at all in public has been earned.

Now all we need is to continue to speak the truth fearlessly, and we shall add to our number those who will turn the scale to the side of equal and full justice in all things.

To make the public sentiment, on the side of all that is just and true and noble, is the highest use of life.

But I do believe that a woman's truest place is in a home, with a husband and with children, and with large freedom, pecuniary freedom, personal freedom, and the right to vote

Henceforth the leaves of the tree of knowledge were for women, and for the healing of the nations.

I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.

The idea of equal rights was in the air.

A wife should no more take her husband's name than he should hers. My name is my identity and must not be lost

If a woman earned a dollar by scrubbing, her husband had a right to take the dollar and go and get drunk with it and beat her afterwards. It was his dollar.

I know not what you believe of God, but I believe He gave yearnings and longings to be filled, and that He did not mean all our time should be devoted to feeding and clothing the body

The press, many-tongued, surpassed itself in reproaches upon these women who had so far departed from their sphere as to speak in public.

We pleaded that whatever was fit to be done at all might with propriety be done by anybody who did it well; that the tools belonged to those who could use them; that the possession of a power presupposed a right to its use. This was urged from city to city, from state to state. Women were encouraged to try new occupations.

If, while I hear the wild shriek of the slave mother robbed of her little ones, I do not open my mouth, am I not guilty?

To make the public sentiment on the side of all that is just and true and noble is the highest use of life.

I believe that the influence of woman will save the country before every other power.

In Massachusetts, where properly qualified 'persons' were allowed to practice law, the Supreme Court decided that a woman was not a 'person,' and a special act of the legislature had to be passed before Miss Lelia Robinson could be admitted to the bar. But today women are lawyers.

The road before us is shorter than the road behind.

Too much has already been said and written about women's sphere. Leave women, then, to find their sphere.

I return my tax bill without paying it. My reason for doing so is that women suffer taxation yet have not representation.

The last speaker alluded to this movement as being that of a few disappointed women. From the first years to which my memory stretches, I have been a disappointed woman.... I was disappointed when I came to seek a profession worthy an immortal being--every employment was closed to me, except those of the teacher, the seamstress, and the housekeeper. In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of woman. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

All over this land women have no political existence. Laws pass over our heads that we can not unmake. Our property is taken fromus without our consent. The babes we bear in anguish and carry in our arms are not ours.

We ask only for justice and equal rights-the right to vote, the right to our own earnings, equality before the law.

You may talk about Free Love, if you please, but we are to have the right to vote. To-day we are fined, imprisoned, and hanged, without a jury trial by our peers. You shall not cheat us by getting us off to talk about something else. When we get the suffrage, then you may taunt us with anything you please, and we will then talk about it as long as you please.

Make the world better.

Oh, I wish it were in my power to put men in the place of fashionable women for one six months! They should curl their hair, consult the milliner, make spongecake, do a little embroidery, wear long skirts, and dress so tightly that they could scarcely breathe.

It is time we gave man faith in woman -- and, still more, woman faith in herself.

We must be true to each other.

Christianity ... that musty old theology, which already has its grave clothes on, and is about to be buried... A wall of Bible, brimstone, church and corruption has hitherto hemmed women into nothingness.

In education, in marriage, in religion, in everything, disappointment is the lot of women. It shall be the business of my life to deepen this disappointment in every woman's heart until she bows down to it no longer.

Leave women to find their sphere.

I think God rarely gives to one man, or one set of men, more than one great moral victory to win.

We have every reason to rejoice when there are so many gains and when favorable conditions abound on every hand. The end is not yet in sight, but it can not be far away. The road before us is shorter than the road behind.

It is very little to me to have the right to vote, to own property, etc., if I may not keep my body, and its uses, in my absolute right

The widening of woman's sphere is to improve her lot. Let us do it, and if the world scoff, let it scoff if it sneer, let it sneer.

I expect some new phases of life this summer, and shall try to get the honey from each moment.

The politician is the creature of the public sentiment -- never goes ahead of it because he depends on it . . .

We want rights. The flour merchant, the house-builder, and the postman charge us no less on account of our sex; but when we endeavor to earn money to pay all these, then, indeed, we find the interest.

Our victory is sure to come, and I can endure anything but recreancy to principle.

Every new truth has its birth-place in a manger, lives thirty years, is crucified, and then deified.

It is not quite the same when we are seventy-two as when we are twenty-seven; still I am glad of what is left, and wish we might both hold out till the victory we have sought is won, but all the same the victory is coming. In the aftertime the world will be the better for it.

Women are in bondage; their clothes are a great hindrance to their engaging in any business which will make them pecuniarily independent, and since the soul of womanhood never can be queenly and noble so long as it must beg bread for its body, is it not better, even at the expense of a vast deal of annoyance, that they whose lives deserve respect and are greater than their garments should give an example by which woman may more easily work out her own emancipation?

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

I was a woman before I was an abolitionist. I must speak for the women.