Carrie Chapman Catt Quotes

What is prejudice? An opinion, which is not based upon reason; a judgment, without having heard the argument; a feeling, without being able to trace from whence it came.

The struggle for the vote was an effort to bring men to feel less superior and women to feel less inferior.

The answer to one is the answer to all. Government by 'the people' is expedient or it is not. If it is expedient, then obviously all the people must be included.

Just as the world war is no white man's war, but every man's war, so is the struggle for woman suffrage no white woman's struggle, but every woman's struggle.

For two generations groups of women have given their lives and their fortunes to secure the vote for the sex and hundreds of thousands of other women are now giving all the time at their command. No class of men in our own or any other country has made one-tenth the effort nor sacrificed one-tenth as much for the vote.

Service to a just cause rewards the worker with more real happiness and satisfaction than any other venture of life.

Roll up your sleeves, set your mind to making history, and wage such a fight for liberty that the whole world will respect our sex.

When a just cause reaches its flood-tide...whatever stands in its way must fall before its overwhelming force.

There are whole precincts of voters in this country whose united intelligence does not equal that of one representative American woman.

The world taught women nothing skillful and then said her work was valueless. It permitted her no opinions and said she did not know how to think. It forbade her to speak in public and said the sex had no orators. It denied her the schools, and said the sex had no genius. It robbed her of every vestige of responsibility, and then called her weak. It taught her that every pleasure must come as a favor from men and when, to gain it, she decked herself in paint and fine feathers, as she had been taught to do, it called her vain.

White supremacy will be strengthened, not weakened, by women's suffrage.

The vote is the emblem of your equality, women of America, the guarantee of your liberty.

Parliaments have stopped laughing at woman suffrage, and politicians have begun to dodge! It is the inevitable premonition of coming victory.

the system which admits the unworthy to the vote provided they are men, and shuts out the worthy provided they are women, is so unjust and illogical that its perpetuation is a sad reflection upon American thinking.

Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in government.

The woman suffrage movement in the United States was a movement of the spirit of the Revolution which was striving to hold the nation to the ideals which won independence.

There is one thing no people have ever done; that is, to oppose a threatening war with intelligent and vigorous purpose some years before it was due to arrive.

living for a high purpose is as honorable as dying for it.

If we learn from the experience, there is no failure, only delayed victory.

it was the United States which first established general suffrage for men upon the two principles that 'taxation without representation is tyranny' and that governments to be just should 'derive their consent from the governed.' The unanswerable logic of these two principles is responsible for the extension of suffrage to men and women the world over. In the United States, however, women are still taxed without 'representation' and still live under a government to which they have given no 'consent.

No written law has ever been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

The vote is a power, a weapon of offense and defense, a prayer.

The belief that we are defending the highest good of the mothers of our race and the ultimate welfare of society makes every sacrifice seem trivial, every duty a pleasure.

The vote has been costly. Prize it...understand what it means and what it can do for your country.

In the adjustment of the new order of things, we women demand an equal voice; we shall accept nothing less.

To get that word, male, out of the Constitution, cost the women of this country fifty-two years of pauseless campaign; 56 state referendum campaigns; 480 legislative campaigns to get state suffrage amendments submitted; 47 state constitutional convention campaigns; 277 state party convention campaigns; 30 national party convention campaigns to get suffrage planks in the party platforms; 19 campaigns with 19 successive Congresses to get the federal amendment submitted, and the final ratification campaign.

Do not stand in the way of the next step in human progress. No one living who reads the signs of the times but realizes that woman suffrage must come. We are working for the ballot as a matter of justice and as a step for human betterment.