Mary Astell Quotes

Women are born, living their lives, and dying without the justice which they have been waiting for since the time of the caveman.

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.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, declaring that all men were created equal, he owned slaves. Women couldn't vote. But, throughout history, our abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights leaders called on our nation, in reality, to live up to the nation's professed ideals in that Declaration.

I believe that all men and women are created equal, but it took our country until 1920 to acknowledge this for women. And then it took until 1964, the year before I was born, to outlaw discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. And same-sex marriage became the law of the land in 2015.

The thing I want to see before I die is women achieving full equality in the world. I'm very passionate about injustice against women and there's too much of it in the world. In so many parts of the world, women are not regarded as worthy or equal to men. In parts of the world, women are bought and sold.

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

Women are oppressed in the east, in the west, in the south, in the north. Women are oppressed inside, outside home, a woman is oppressed in religion, she is oppressed outside religion.

I confront the European elite's self-image as tolerant 'while under their noses women are living like slaves.

As is the case with many Middle Eastern nations, women are nowhere near equal to men when it comes to basic freedoms and rights that we take for granted every day.

Is it right that your mother, your sister... should be classed with criminals and lunatics...? Is it right that while the loafer, the gambler, the drunkard, and even the wife-beater has a vote, earnest, educated and refined women are denied it?... Is it right... that a mother... should be thought unworthy of a vote that is freely given to the blasphemer, the liar, the seducer, and the profligate?

The exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than ours.

Unless the woman is liberated, there is no freedom in Iraqi land.

Among the progress of the human mind that is most important for human happiness, we must count the entire destruction of the prejudices that have established inequality between the sexes, fatal even to the sex it favors….This inequality has no other source but the abuse of power, and men have tried in vain to excuse it by sophisms.

Is Justice to be established by subjecting half of mankind to the will of the other half? Justice, Sir, is blind to colors, and weighs in equal scales the rights of all men whether white or black…. An opportunity is now presented, if not to diminish, at least to prevent the growth of a sin that sits heavy on the soul of every one of us.

It is a crime against humanity that our women are confined within the four walls of their homes like prisoners. They should stand side by side with men as their companions in all spheres of life.

The darkest page in history is the persecutions of woman.

Woman was the first human being that tasted bondage. Woman was a slave before the slave existed.

I ask no favors for my sex. I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is, that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on that ground which God designed us to occupy.

I am persuaded that the rights of woman, like the rights of slaves, need only be examined to be understood and asserted.

I do not fight against men, but against the system that is sexist.

There is no kind of harassment that a man may not inflict on a woman with impunity in civilized societies.

All women, and men of color - we were owned like tables and chairs. We spent a hundred years getting a legal identity as human beings. That's a big thing.

Those religions that are oppressive to women are also against democracy, human rights, and freedom of expression.

We are victims of evil customs. It is a crime against humanity that our women are shut up within the four walls of the houses as prisoners. There is no sanction anywhere for the deplorable condition in which our women have to live.

Why is Slavery so much condemn'd and strove against in one Case, and so highly applauded and held so necessary and so sacred in another?