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Suffrage Quotes

Browse 202 quotes about Suffrage.

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Suffrage Quotes

“The most revolutionary change that hit the world in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was the liberation of women. The Bible and the Qur’an came from societies controlled by men. No surprise there. That’s how the world everywhere was run until fairly recently. And there is something worth noting before we go deeper into the issue. History shows that the men in charge never volunteer to give up their privileges. They don’t wake up one day and say, ‘I’ve suddenly realised that the way I control and dominate others is wrong. I must change my ways. So I’ll share my power with them. I’ll give them the vote!’ That’s never how it works. History shows that power always has to be wrested from those who have it. The suffragettes who fought for the vote or suffrage for women learned that lesson. Men didn’t volunteer to give women the vote. Women had to fight them for it.”

ReligionFeminismBibleSuffrage
Book:A Little History of Religion
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“Whatever the theories may be of woman’s dependence on man, in the supreme moments of her life he can not bear her burdens. Alone she goes to the gates of death to give life to every man that is born into the world. No one can share her fears, no one can mitigate her pangs; and if her sorrow is greater than she can bear, alone she passes beyond the gates into the vast unknown.”

DeathWomenFeminismIndependenceSuffrageChivalry
Book:Solitude of Self
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“Its magnificence was indescribable, and its magnitude was inconceivable. She felt overwhelmed in the presence of its greatness. Pg 87”

BookFictionNovelNew YorkImmigrationHistorical FictionWorld War IWomen S RightsItalyProhibitionSuffrage1920sStatue Of LibertyWwiEllis IslandCafe SocietyHell S KitchenSuffragist MovementForty Years In A DayItalian American Book40 Years And A Day40 Years In A DayBest Historical FictionDianne VigoritoMona MarzanoMona RodriguezNew Historical FictionTop Fiction
Author:Mona Rodriguez FORTY YEARS IN A DAY
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“Confession is good for the soul even after the soul has been claimed” (p. 381).”

BookFictionNovelNew YorkImmigrationHistorical FictionWorld War IWomen S RightsItalyProhibitionSuffrage1920sStatue Of LibertyWwiEllis IslandCafe SocietyHell S KitchenSuffragist MovementForty Years In A DayItalian American Book40 Years And A Day40 Years In A DayBest Historical FictionDianne VigoritoMona MarzanoMona RodriguezNew Historical FictionTop Fiction
Author:Mona Rodriguez FORTY YEARS IN A DAY
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“The Constitution, the National Assembly, the dynastic parties, the blue and the red republicans, the heroes of Africa, the thunder from the platform, the sheet lightning of the daily press, the entire literature, the political names and the intellectual reputations, the civil law and penal code, the liberté, égalité, fraternité and the second of May 1852—all have vanished like a phantasmagoria before the spell of a man whom even his enemies do not make out to be a magician. Universal suffrage seems to have survived only for a moment, in order that with its own hand it may make its last will and testament before the eyes of all the world and declare in the name of the people itself: Everything that exists has this much worth, that it will perish.”

RevolutionConstitutionSocialismFranceFascismDictatorshipDictatorMagicianMonarchyBourgeoisAuthoritarianismSuffrageRepublicansDynastySpellPressNapoleonAuthoritarianThird RepublicCoup D EtatFrench RepublicBrumaireCipollaLouis BonaparteMario And The MagicianMountebank
Book:The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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“Those who seek to suppress voting today are either ignorant of the history or are, as I suspect is more often the case, malevolently choosing to ignore it... To suppress the vote is to make a mockery of democracy. And those who do so are essentially acknowledging that their policies are unpopular. If you can't convince a majority of voters that your ideas are worthy, you try to limit the pool of voters. This reveals a certain irony: Many who are most vocal in championing a free, open, and dynamic economy are the same political factions that suppress these principles when it comes to the currency of ideas.”

VotingSuffrageVoting RightsDisenfranchisement
Book:What Unites Us: Reflections on Patriotism
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“[Jeff] Sessions was "someone who thinks that the VRA ought not to have ever been in existence" because, for him, it was an "intrusive piece of legislation." Thus, in a move that flipped the Voting Rights Act on its head, his investigation targeted only counties where African Americans had won office.”

RacismAmerican HistoryCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoting Rights ActDisenfranchisementJeff Sessions
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The ACLU and NAACP went right after the core of the issue—there was no voter fraud. Therefore, there was no state interest at stake—certainly nothing that could warrant this assault on the Fifteenth Amendment. It "bear[s] repeating," they asserted, that Indiana had "not identified even a single instance of voter impersonation fraud occurring at the polls in the history of Indiana" and no one in the state has "ever been charged" with that crime. Ever. Moreover, when the bill was being drafted, "no evidence of in-person impersonation fraud was presented to the legislature," making SEA 483, at best, a solution in search of a problem.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageIndianaVoter SuppressionVoter FraudDisenfranchisement
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Whatever the question up for discussion as to wrongs, injustice, inequality, maladministration of the law, Miss Anthony would always say, 'Well, now when women get the ballot all that will be changed.' So I asked her one day, 'Miss Anthony, do you really believe that the millennium is going to come when women get the ballot? Knowing women as I do, and their petty outlook on life, although I believe that it is right that they should have the vote, I do not believe that the exercise of the vote is going to change women's nature nor the political situation.' Miss Anthony seemed a little bit startled, but she did not make any contention on that point.”

SuffrageWomen S SuffrageSusan B Anthony1898
Book:Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells
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“What the states could not accomplish by law, they were more than willing to achieve by violence. The wholesale slaughter of African Americans in Colfax, Louisiana (1873), Wilmington, North Carolina (1898), and Ocoee, Florida (1920), resulted in the loss of hundreds of lives simply because whites were enraged that black people had voted.”

RacismWhite SupremacyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The Civil Rights Act (1957), while seemingly a landmark piece of legislation, was actually a paper tiger that had no ability to protect the right to vote. The act did create the Civil Rights Commission, upgrade the Department of Justice's section on civil rights to a division, and authorize the U.S. attorney general to sue those violating the voting rights of American citizens. But it was—by design and implementation—no match for the entrenched resistance to black citizenship.”

RacismAmerican HistoryWhite SupremacyCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“The VRA was nevertheless a seismic shift in thought, action, and execution for the U.S. government when compared with the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and its equally enfeebled companion legislation of 1960. Rather than passively waiting for locales to violate the rights of American citizens and then sitting still until those who had been routinely brutalized by this system made a formal complaint, the VRA put the responsibility for adhering to the Constitution onto state and local governments.”

RacismAmerican HistoryCivil Rights MovementUs HistorySuffrageVoter SuppressionVoting Rights Act
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Paul Weyrich, a conservative activist and founder of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which eventually crafted voter suppression legislation that spread like a cancer throughout the United States, was brutally clear: "I don't want everybody to vote.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“All that had to happen was for the GOP to reinforce the lie of voter fraud, create the public perception of democracy imperiled, increase the groundswell to "protect the integrity of the ballot box," require exactly the type of identification that blacks, the poor, the young, and the elderly did not have, and, equally important, mask these acts of aggressive voter suppression behind the nobility of being "civic-minded.”

RacismAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageAgeismVoter SuppressionVoter Fraud
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“In 1890...the Magnolia State passed the Mississippi Plan, a dizzying array of poll taxes, literacy tests, understanding clauses, newfangled voter registration rules, and "good character" clauses—all intentionally racially discriminatory but dressed up in the genteel garb of bringing "integrity" to the voting booth.”

RacismAmerican HistoryWhite SupremacyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“Bilbo was pointing to the power of the literacy test and understanding clause, which were tailor-made for societies that systematically refused to educate millions of their citizens and ensured that the bulk of the population remained functionally illiterate...for most of the twentieth century, many Jim Crow school systems did not have high schools for African Americans.”

EducationRacismAmerican HistoryLiteracyUs HistorySuffrageVoter Suppression
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“So then the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged to create the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which personally I think is rather a mouthful,' Adelaide said as she set down her wineglass. 'I'm sure others have much shorter terms,' the doctor said, sawing into his steak with more vigor than necessary. 'Such as?' Grace asked. 'There are plenty who just call us bitches, dear.”

HistoryAmerican HistoryUs HistorySuffrageWoman SuffrageSuffragettesSuffragistsWomen S Suffrage
Book:A Madness So Discreet
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“It was rather a choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the altar of national integrity; and some felt and feel only indifference and contempt.”

SlaverySouthVotingAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsReconstructionSuffrageVoting Rights
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
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“The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guaranty of your liberty. That vote of yours has cost millions of dollars and the lives of thousands of women. Women have suffered agony of soul which you never can comprehend, that you and your daughters might inherit political freedom. That vote has been costly. Prize it! The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer. Use it intelligently, conscientiously, prayerfully. Progress is calling to you to make no pause. Act!”

SuffrageVoting Rights
Author:Carrie Catt
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“If I am asked, What do you propose to substitute for universal suffrage? Practically, What have you to recommend? I answer at once, Nothing. The whole current of thought and feeling, the whole stream of human affairs, is setting with irresistible force in that direction. The old ways of living, many of which were just as bad in their time as any of our devices can be in ours, are breaking down all over Europe, and are floating this way and that like haycocks in a flood. Nor do I see why any wise man should expend much thought or trouble on trying to save their wrecks. The waters are out and no human force can turn them back, but I do not see why as we go with the stream we need sing Hallelujah to the river god.”

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Author:James Fitzjames Stephen
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“Another powerful tool to stop African Americans from having any political voice was the white primary. Key to the white primary effectiveness was the fact that from Reconstruction until 1968 the South was a one-party system⁠—only Democrats needed apply, so despised was the party of Lincoln. Several of the states, therefore, began to discern that one way to skirt around the Fifteenth Amendment was to tinker with the primary election, during which the Democratic candidate was chosen.”

RacismSuffrageVoter SuppressionWhite Primary
Book:One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
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“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy-a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

PoliticsPowerRightsSlaveryHuman RightsActivismDissentAbolitionSuffrageAgitationRadicalismLiberties
Author:Frederick Douglass
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“A declaration of war on the masses by higher men is needed! ... Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the people or the feminine, works in favor of universal suffrage, i.e. the domination of the inferior men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.”

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Author:Friedrich Nietzsche
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