Elizabeth Cady Stanton Quotes

How can any woman believe that a loving and merciful God would, in one breath, command Eve to multiply and replenish the earth, and in the next, pronounce a curse upon her maternity? I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or gave out the laws about women which he is accused of doing.

The bible teaches that women brought sin and death into the world. I don’t believe that any man ever talked with god. The bible was written by man out of his love of domination.

The point I wish plainly to bring before you on this occasion is the individuality of each human soul–our Protestant idea, the right of individual conscience and judgment–our republican idea, individual citizenship. In discussing the rights of woman, we are to consider, first, what belongs to her as an individual, in a world of her own, the arbiter of her own destiny, an imaginary Robinson Crusoe with her woman Friday on a solitary island. Her rights under such circumstances are to use all her faculties for her own safety and happiness.

Throughout this protracted and disgraceful assault on American womanhood, the clergy baptized each new insult and act of injustice in the name of the Christian religion, and uniformly asked God’s blessing on proceedings that would have put to shame an assembly of Hottentots.

The great fault of mankind is that it will not think.

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.

Human beings lose their logic in their vindictiveness.

These teachings in regard to woman so faithfully reflect the provisions of the canon law that it is fair to infer that their inspiration came from the same source, written by men, translated by men, revised by men. If the Bible is to be placed in the hands of our children, read in our schools, taught in our theological seminaries, proclaimed as God’s law in our temples of worship, let us by all means call a council of women in New York, and give it one more revision from the woman’s standpoint.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.

It requires philosophy and heroism to rise above the opinion of the wise men of all nations and races.

Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens.

I have been into many of the ancient cathedrals – grand, wonderful, mysterious. But I always leave them with a feeling of indignation because of the generations of human beings who have struggled in poverty to build these altars to the unknown god.