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Put it down in capital letters: SELF-DEVELOPMENT IS A HIGHER DUTY THAN SELF-SACRIFICE. The thing that most retards and militates against women’s self development is self-sacrifice.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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Elizabeth Cady Stanton
Age: 87 †
Born: 1815
Born: January 1
Died: 1902
Died: October 26
Abolitionist
Activist
Feminist
Suffragist
Writer
Johnstown
New York
Sacrifice
Development
Duty
Higher
Women
Retards
Self
Retard
Thing
Capital
Letters

More quotes by Elizabeth Cady Stanton

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When women can support themselves, have entry to all the trades and professions, with a house of their own over their heads and a bank account, they will own their bodies and be dictators in the social realm.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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To refuse political equality is to rob the ostracized of all self-respect.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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The most fitting monuments this nation can build are schoolhouses and homes for those who do the work of the world. It is no answer to say that they are accustomed to rags and hunger. In this world of plenty every human being has a right to food, clothes, decent shelter, and the rudiments of education.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Men who can, when they wish to write a document, shut themselves up for days with their thoughts and their books, know little of what difficulties a woman must surmount to get off a tolerable production.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Chauncy Burr ... talks well, possibly better than he thinks. But this is a common failing.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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How anyone, in view of the protracted sufferings of the race, can invest the laws of the universe with a tender loving fatherly intelligence, watching, guiding and protecting humanity, is to me amazing.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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The woman is uniformly sacrificed to the wife and mother.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Who, I ask you, can take, dare take, on himself the rights, the duties, the responsibilities of another human soul?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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No privileged order ever did see the wrongs of its own victims.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Accepting the view that man was prior in the creation, some Scriptural writers say that as the woman was of the man, therefore, her position should be one of subjection. Grant it, then as the historical fact is reversed in our day, and the man is now of the woman, shall his place be one of subjection?
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Eve tasted the apple in the Garden of Eden in order to slake that intense thirst for knowledge that the simple pleasure of picking flowers and talking to Adam could not satisfy.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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The moment we begin to fear the opinions of others and hesitate to tell the truth that is in us, and from motives of policy are silent when we should speak, the divine floods of light and life no longer flow into our souls.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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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.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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I am always busy, which is perhaps the chief reason why I am always well.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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All through the centuries scholars and scientists have been imprisoned, tortured and burned alive for some discovery which seemed to conflict with a petty text of Scripture. Surely the immutable laws of the universe can teach more impressive and exalted lessons than the holy books of all the religions on earth.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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Love is the vital essence that pervades and permeates, from the center to the circumference, the graduating circles of all thought and action. Love is the talisman of human weal and woe -the open sesame to every soul.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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... women feel the humiliation of their petty distinctions of sex precisely as the black man feels those of color. It is no palliation of our wrongs to say that we are not socially ostracized, so long as we are politically ostracized as he is not.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
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The talk of sheltering woman from the fierce storms of life is the sheerest mockery, for they beat on her from every point of thecompass, just as they do on man, and with more fatal results, for he has been trained to protect himself, to resist, to conquer.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton