W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

We fully believed, so soon as we saw that woman's suffrage was right, every one would soon see the same thing, and that in a year or two, at farthest, it would be granted.

I still remember, at the age of 12, learning that segregation had been permitted only a couple of decades before I was born and that a woman's right to vote was not even a century old. But it was great Americans who stood up, some dying for the cause, to make our country better.

We got the vote, which we should've been born with, in 1920. Everything we've had to struggle for - it's ridiculous.

Women waited 144 years before earning suffrage. If a mature, multiparty democracy was so darn easy, everybody would have one.

I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ask for the ballot for the Negro and not for the woman.

Convicts and lunatics have no vote for Parliament. Should all women be classed with those?

Votes for women didn’t come until the 1920’s. Votes for Blacks didn’t effectively come until the 1960’s.

We are justified in believing that the success of this movement for equality of the sexes means more progress toward equality of the races.

It is also unsatisfactory to some, that the elective franchise is not given to the colored man. I would myself prefer that it were now conferred on the very intelligent, and on those who serve our cause as soldiers.

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.

Civil rights and women's rights and gay rights all take time in this country.

Do you care about climate justice? Are you about women's rights and women's reproductive rights? Do you care about civil liberties and the Voting Rights Act? There are so many opportunities for people to go back and be inspired and plug into their own community.

It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union.... Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less

Gay people who want to marry have no desire to redefine marriage in any way. When women got the right to vote, it did not redefine voting.

For twelve successive Congresses we have appeared before committees of the two Houses making this plea, that the underlying principle of our Government, the right of consent, shall have practical application to the other half of people. Such a little simple thing we have been asking for a quarter of a century. For over forty years, longer than the children of Israel wandered through the wilderness, we have been begging and praying and pleading for this act of justice. We shall some day be heeded.

We are told it will be of no use for us to ask this measure of justice--that the ballot be given to the women of our new possessions upon the same terms as to the men--because we shall not get it. It is not our business whether we are going to get it; our business is to make the demand.... Ask for the whole loaf and take what you can get.

We are here to advance the cause of women and to advance the cause of democracy and to make it absolutely clear that the two are inseparable.

You can't put civil rights on the ballot.

I beg you to speak of Woman as you do of the Negro, speak of her as a human being, as a citizen of the United States, as a half of the people in whose hands lies the destiny of this Nation.

Proof that they do not understand the republic is that in their fine promises for universal suffrage, they forgot women.

Mr. President how long must women wait to get their liberty? Let us have the rights we deserve.

My mother saw nothing inconsistent in her traditional desire to look after her husband and children and her radical politics. She began her civil rights work before most people had ever heard the word 'feminism,' and in those early years, she was focused on racial justice.

The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.

Women, we might as well be dogs baying the moon as petitioners without the right to vote!

The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.