Victoria Woodhull
Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.Collection: Society
Let women issue a declaration of independence sexually, and absolutely refuse to cohabit with men until they are acknowledged as equals in everything, and the victory would be won in a single week.Collection: Independence
I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.Collection: Government
I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable I trust that my sincerity will not be called into question.Collection: Trust
I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.Collection: Happiness
Women have no government.Collection: Government
I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.Collection: Change
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?
It makes no difference who or what you are, old or young, black or white, pagan, Jew, or Christian, I want to love you all and be loved by you all, and I mean to have your love.
I and others of my sex find ourselves controlled by a form of government in the inauguration of which we had no voice.
While others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it.
By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?
I endeavor to make the most of everything.
Woman, no less than man, can qualify herself for the more onerous occupations of life.
When I found I had given birth to a human wreckage, to a child that was an imbecile, my heart was broken.
Is it fair to treat a woman worse than a man, and then revile her because she is a woman?
To go behind a man's hall-door is mean, cowardly, unfair opposition.
Suffrage is a common right of citizenship. Women have the right of suffrage. Logically it cannot be escaped.
I do not shake hands from a sanitary standpoint.
If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.
For a woman to consider a financial question was shuddered over as a profanity.
I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.
Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.
The women of the country have the power in their own hands, in spite of the law and the government being altogether of the male order.
My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism. I put myself before the public voluntarily.
My judges preach against free love openly, practice it secretly.
I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.
Denounce me for advocating freedom if you can, and I will bear your curse with a better resignation.
There is something wrong with a government that makes women the legal property of their husbands. The whole system needs changing, but men will never make the changes. They have too much to lose.Collection: Husband
No man who respects his mother or loves his sister, can speak disparagingly of any woman; however low she may seem to have sunk, she is still a woman. I want every man to remember this. Every woman is, or, at some time, has been a sister or daughter.Collection: Sister
It is not great wealth in a few individuals that proves a country is prosperous, but great general wealth evenly distributed among the people. . .Collection: Country
The uses of government should be to foster, protect and promote the possession of equality.Collection: Women
The sin of all time has been the exercise of assumed powers. This is the essence of tyranny.Collection: Exercise
Women have every right; they just have to excercise them.Collection: Women
Woman's ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.Collection: Men
The rights of children as individuals begin while yet they remain the foetus...Whoever has read the 'Weekly' knows I hold abortion (except to save the life of the mother) to be just as much murder as the killing of a person after birth is murder.Collection: Mother
All talk of women's rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them.Collection: Exercise
Good care is taken that each state shall have its prisons . . . and other asylums; but not one building is erected nor one law enforced that would teach the people how not to contribute to these over-crowded receptacles of human misery . . . . All of our politicians are ready to deal with the effects, but not one of them is brave enough to penetrate the substratum of society and deal with the cause.Collection: Taken
So after all I am a very promiscuous free lover. I want the love of you all, promiscuously.Collection: Want
The spirits are coming back to tear your damned system of sexual slavery into tatters and consign its blackened remnants to the depth of everlasting hell.Collection: Tears
Strike as much and as hard as you please, only don't do it in the dark so that I cannot know who is my enemy.Collection: Dark
When I first saw the light of day on this planet, it seemed as if I had been rudely awakened from a death-like sleep.Collection: Sleep
All that is good and commendable now existing would continue to exist if all marriage laws were repealed tomorrow . . .Collection: Law
Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputations on the line in support of an idea or enterprise.Collection: Ideas
The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression . . . by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation, or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained.Collection: Sex
The wife who submits to sexual intercourse against her wishes or desires, virtually commits suicide; while the husband who compels it, commits murder.Collection: Suicide
I believe in Spiritualism; I advocate free love in the highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the damnation by which men corrupt God's most holy institution of sexual relations.Collection: Believe
A new educational system in which all children born shall have the same advantage of physical, industrial, mental and moral culture, and thus be equally prepared at maturity to enter upon active, responsible and useful lives. . . . In so doing, it strikes a fatal blow at . . . the most demoralizing of all monopolies. . . educational superiority.Collection: Children
I boldly entered the arena of business and exercised the rights I already possessed.Collection: Rights
Hundreds, thousands, aye, millions of human beings, men, women and children, wander the streets of our cities and the highways of our country, hungry, ragged and cold, vainly seeking in this land of plenty, where physical want should be unknown.Collection: Country