The most fitting monuments this nation can build are schoolhouses and homes for those who do the work of the world. It is no answer to say that they are accustomed to rags and hunger. In this world of plenty every human being has a right to food, clothes, decent shelter, and the rudiments of education.

... our scholarships should be bestowed on those whose ability and earnestness in the primary department have been proved, and whose capacity for a higher education is fully shown. This is the best work women of wealth can do, and I hope in the future they will endow scholarships for their own sex instead of giving millions of dollars to institutions for boys, as they have done in the past.

Womanhood is the great fact in her life; wifehood and motherhood are but incidental relations.

You may go over the world and you will find that every form of religion which has breathed upon this earth has degraded woman.

Nothing strengthens the judgment and quickens the conscience like individual responsibility. Nothing adds such dignity to character as the recognition of one's self-sovereignty; the right to an equal place, everywhere conceded--a place earned by personal merit, not an artificial attainment by inheritance, wealth, family and position.

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.

The only points in which I differ from all ecclesiastical teaching is that I do not believe that any man ever saw or talked with God, I do not believe that God inspired the Mosaic code, or told the historians what they say he did about woman, for all the religions on the face of the earth degrade her, and so long as woman accepts the position that they assign her, her emancipation is impossible.