Stacey Abrams Quotes

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

We women of America tell you that America is not a democracy. Twenty million women are denied the right to vote.

A riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention.

We have a legacy to uphold: the people who died so that we could have the right to vote; the people who sacrificed so that we would one day realize the dream of a black president.

A man without a vote is in this land like a man without a hand.

One-fourth of the children in this country are poor—and they don't vote.

The right to vote is the most powerful non-violent tool we have in the struggle for civil rights.

Is it right that your mother, your sister... should be classed with criminals and lunatics... ? Is it right that while 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?

Give the woman the ballot and you will make her more important in the eyes of the world.

I walked around feeling, in a sense, that people of color, we began at the bottom of a slave ship. We were enslaved; we picked cotton. There was Honest Abe, who wore a top hat and was taller than anyone and who said, 'Enough is enough; slavery must end.' And then, black people could stand up again. But after that, we didn't catch up.

To me, it was shocking that a government of men could look with such extreme contempt on a movement that was asking nothing except such a simple little thing as the right to vote.

Too many people have lost their lives, particularly in the African-American community, for the right to vote. I stand in their shadows and I am standing on their shoulders.

I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.

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

When they wrote the Constitution, only white male landowners had the right to vote.

Suffrage is the pivotal right.

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

I have spent all my life advocating on behalf of the poor, oppressed and marginalized. As a social justice and human rights activist, and now as President of the Republic of Malawi, I have a deep appreciation for the challenges of those on the margins of society.

Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freeman with votes in their hands are left without education.

The great majority of women are more intelligent, better educated, and far more moral than multitudes of men whose right to vote no man questions.

This nation ... has not yet reached the point of giving all men their rights by a suffrage amendment; three-fourths of the States are not ready

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

The common people who marched for the right to vote must now march for the right to breathe.

If the Constitution does not allow women to vote, then the Constitution should be amended or abolished.

Today we round out the first century of a professed republic,—with woman figuratively representing freedom—and yet all free, save woman