Suffrage Quotes

“Women have a much better time than men in this world; there are far more things forbidden to them.”
― Oscar Wilde

“Knowledge makes a man unfit to be a slave.”
― Frederick Douglass

“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.”
― Susan B. Anthony

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July?

I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”
― Frederick Douglass

“People who are not capable of boarding by group number do not deserve the right to vote.”
― J.K. Franko

“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.”
― Susan B. Anthony

“There never will be complete equality until women themselves help to make laws and elect lawmakers.”
― Susan B. Anthony

“The happiest people I have known have been those who gave themselves no concern about their own souls, but did their uttermost to mitigate the miseries of others.”
― Elizabeth Cady Stanton, History of Woman Suffrage, Volumes I-III

“And although we adore men individually, we agree that as a group they're rather stupid.”
― Richard M. Sherman, Vocal Selections from Walt Disney's Mary Poppins

“If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?”
― Victoria Claflin Woodhull

“Be militant in your own way! Those of you who can break windows, break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property...do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion. Take me if you dare! (Emmeline Pankhurst, 1912)”
― Fran Abrams

“In the world at large we seldom vote for a principle or a given state of affairs. We vote for a man who pretends to believe in that principle or promises to achieve that state. We don't want a man, we want a condition of peace and plenty-- or, it may be, war and want-- but we must vote for a man.”
― B.F. Skinner, Walden Two

“Amazing, Yetta thought. Back home I couldn't have chosen my own husband. And here I'm thinking about choosing presidents, governors, mayors, laws...”
― Margaret Peterson Haddix, Uprising

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

“When a citizen gives his suffrage to a man of known immorality he abuses his trust; he sacrifices not only his own interest, but that of his neighbor; he betrays the interest of his country.”
― Noah Webster

“But Mather's smile faded as he thought of what other provisions the charter contained. What would the godly say when they learned that the electorate was no longer to be limited to members of the Covenant but broadened to include propertied members of every Christian sect this side of papistry? This was a revolutionary innovation, whose consequences would be incalculable. Hitherto the limitation of the privilege of voting to the elect had been the very corner-stone of theocracy. It had been a wise and human provision designed to keep the faithful in control even when, as had long ago become the case, they were heavily outnumbered by lesser men without the Covenant. God who had not designated the majority of men to salvation surely never intended for the damned to rule. Yet now, under the new charter, it very much looked as if they might.”
― Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts: A Modern Enquiry Into the Salem Witch Trials

“Ex-offenders are expected to pay fines and court costs, and submit paperwork to multiple agencies in an effort to win back a right that should never have been taken away in a democracy.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

“The righting of the wrongs imposed on womankind therefore had been started not only without the aid of the churches but in face of their determined opposition.”
― David Marshall Brooks, The Necessity Of Atheism

“Another powerful tool to stop African Americans from having any political voice was the white primary. Key to the white primary effectiveness was the fact that from Reconstruction until 1968 the South was a one-party system⁠—only Democrats needed apply, so despised was the party of Lincoln. Several of the states, therefore, began to discern that one way to skirt around the Fifteenth Amendment was to tinker with the primary election, during which the Democratic candidate was chosen.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“What the states could not accomplish by law, they were more than willing to achieve by violence. The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920), resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“The tools of Jim Crow disfranchisement worked all too well. In 1867, the percentage of African American adults registered to vote in Mississippi was 66.9 percent; by 1955, it was 4.3 percent.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“The Civil Rights Act (1957), while seemingly a landmark piece of legislation, was actually a paper tiger that had no ability to protect the right to vote. The act did create the Civil Rights Commission, upgrade the Department of Justice's section on civil rights to a division, and authorize the U.S. attorney general to sue those violating the voting rights of American citizens. But it was—by design and implementation—no match for the entrenched resistance to black citizenship.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“The VRA was nevertheless a seismic shift in thought, action, and execution for the U.S. government when compared with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and its equally enfeebled companion legislation of 1960. Rather than passively waiting for locales to violate the rights of American citizens and then sitting still until those who had been routinely brutalized by this system made a formal complaint, the VRA put the responsibility for adhering to the Constitution onto state and local governments.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“[Jeff] Sessions was "someone who thinks that the VRA ought not to have ever been in existence" because, for him, it was an "intrusive piece of legislation." Thus, in a move that flipped the Voting Rights Act on its head, his investigation targeted only counties where African Americans had won office.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: "I don't want everybody to vote.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to "protect the integrity of the ballot box," require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being "civic-minded.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“The ACLU and NAACP went right after the core of the issue—there was no voter fraud. Therefore, there was no state interest at stake—certainly nothing that could warrant this assault on the Fifteenth Amendment. It "bear[s] repeating," they asserted, that Indiana had "not identified even a single instance of voter impersonation fraud occurring at the polls in the history of Indiana" and no one in the state has "ever been charged" with that crime. Ever. Moreover, when the bill was being drafted, "no evidence of in-person impersonation fraud was presented to the legislature," making SEA 483, at best, a solution in search of a problem.”
― Carol Anderson, One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy

“Habit can so familiarise men with violations of their natural rights that those who have lost them neither think of protesting nor believe they are unjustly treated.”
― Condorcet Marie-Jean-Antoine-Nicolas de Caritat marqués de

“We argued, as we thought then rather logically, that no social class was so good, so true, and so disinterested as to be trusted wholly with the political destiny of its neighbors; that in every state the best arbiters of their own welfare are the persons directly affected; consequently that it is only by arming every hand with a ballot,—with the right to have a voice in the policy of the state,—that the greatest good to the greatest number could be attained.”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk