To live for a principle, for the triumph of some reform by which all mankind are to be lifted up to be wedded to an idea may be, after all, the holiest and happiest of marriages.

The more complete the despotism, the more smoothly all things move on the surface.

Who can sum up all the ills the women of a nation suffer from war? They have all of the misery and none of the glory; nothing to mitigate their weary waiting and watching for the loved ones who return no more.

To think that all in me of which my father would have felt proper pride had I been a man, is deeply mortifying to him because I am a woman.

Men think that self-sacrifice is the most charming of all the cardinal virtues for women, and in order to keep it in healthy working order, they make opportunities for its illustration as often as possible.

Men can never understand the fear of everlasting punishment that fills the souls of women and children. The orthodox religion, as drawn from the Bible and expounded by the church, is enough to drive the most imaginative and sensitive natures to despair and death.

... women learned one important lesson--namely, that it is impossible for the best of men to understand women's feelings or the humiliation of their position. When they asked us to be silent on our question during the War, and labor for the emancipation of the slave, we did so, and gave five years to his emancipation and enfranchisement.... I was convinced, at the time, that it was the true policy. I am now equally sure that it was a blunder.