Victoria Woodhull Quotes

While others prayed for the good time coming, I worked for it.

A reform in the system of criminal jurisprudence, by which the death penalty shall no longer be inflicted . . . and by which our so-called prisons shall be virtually transformed into vast reformatory workshops, from which the unfortunate may emerge to be useful members of society, instead of the alienated citizens they now are.

The will of the entire people is the true basis of republican government, and a free expression . . . by the public vote of all citizens, without distinctions of race, color, occupation, or sex, is the only means by which that will can be ascertained.

One of the charges made against me is that I lived in the same house with my former husband, Dr. Woodhull, and my present husband, Col. Blood. The fact is a fact.

The uses of government should be to foster, protect and promote the possession of equality.

Is it fair to treat a woman worse than a man, and then revile her because she is a woman?

To go behind a man's hall-door is mean, cowardly, unfair opposition.

All talk of women's rights is moonshine. Women have every right. They have only to exercise them.

It is extremely unfortunate that an editor's own life and practice should be notoriously at variance with his written principles.

If Congress refuse to listen to and grant what women ask, there is but one course left then to pursue. What is there left for women to do but to become the mothers of the future government?

I shall make it my business to take my chances in the matter of libel suits.

My opinions and principles are subjects of just criticism.

I am a free lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please.

I ask the rights to pursue happiness by having a voice in that government to which I am accountable.

I offer you the remedy of Free Love as an antidote for enforced lust, and the world will have to take it before the disease can be cured.

If women would today would rise en masse and demand their emancipation, the men would be compelled to grant it.

I believe in Spiritualism; I advocate free love in the highest, purest sense, as the only cure for the damnation by which men corrupt God's most holy institution of sexual relations.

It is not great wealth in a few individuals that proves a country is prosperous, but great general wealth evenly distributed among the people. . .

I endeavor to make the most of everything.

Entrepreneurs are risk takers, willing to roll the dice with their money or reputations on the line in support of an idea or enterprise.

I imagined that the priestly ceremony was perfect sanctification, and that the sin of sins was for either husband or wife to be false to that relation.

I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Rude contact with facts chased my visions and dreams quickly away, and in their stead I beheld the horrors, the corruption, the evils and hypocrisy of society, and as I stood among them, a young wife, a great wail of agony went out from my soul.

Denounce me for advocating freedom if you can, and I will bear your curse with a better resignation.

A new educational system in which all children born shall have the same advantage of physical, industrial, mental and moral culture, and thus be equally prepared at maturity to enter upon active, responsible and useful lives. . . . In so doing, it strikes a fatal blow at . . . the most demoralizing of all monopolies. . . educational superiority.

Hundreds, thousands, aye, millions of human beings, men, women and children, wander the streets of our cities and the highways of our country, hungry, ragged and cold, vainly seeking in this land of plenty, where physical want should be unknown.

I would like above any other place to go to Hartford. I want to face the conservatism there centered and compel it into decency.

No legal ceremony--no election of the woman--no penalty for the perfidy of the man--no law to compel him to do his duty, no compensation for the poor woman who is turned adrift like the girl of the street, penniless, to sell herself on the best possible terms. This is Divine marriage, or Moses and the Bible lie; and this is Bible divorce--putting away!

Woman, no less than man, can qualify herself for the more onerous occupations of life.

I was divorced from Dr. Woodhull for reasons which to me were sufficient, but I was never his enemy.

I do not shake hands from a sanitary standpoint.

When I first saw the light of day on this planet, it seemed as if I had been rudely awakened from a death-like sleep.

Why is a woman to be treated differently? Woman suffrage will succeed, despite this miserable guerilla opposition.

The spirits are coming back to tear your damned system of sexual slavery into tatters and consign its blackened remnants to the depth of everlasting hell.

The American nation, in its march onward and upward, can not publicly choke the intellectual and political activity of half its citizens by narrow statutes.

The women of the country have the power in their own hands, in spite of the law and the government being altogether of the male order.

Women have every right; they just have to excercise them.

I supposed that to marry was to be transported to a heaven not only of happiness but of purity and perfection.

Woman's ability to earn money is better protection against the tyranny and brutality of men than her ability to vote.

I boldly entered the arena of business and exercised the rights I already possessed.

For a woman to consider a financial question was shuddered over as a profanity.

By what right do you refuse to accept the vote of a citizen of the United States?

there are scores of thousands of women who are denominated prostitutes, and who are supported by hundreds of thousands of men who should, for like reasons, also be denominated prostitutes, since what will change a woman into a prostitute must also necessarily change a man into the same.

I shall not change my course because those who assume to be better than I desire it.

I and others of my sex find ourselves controlled by a form of government in the inauguration of which we had no voice.

Good care is taken that each state shall have its prisons . . . and other asylums; but not one building is erected nor one law enforced that would teach the people how not to contribute to these over-crowded receptacles of human misery . . . . All of our politicians are ready to deal with the effects, but not one of them is brave enough to penetrate the substratum of society and deal with the cause.

I now announce myself as candidate for the Presidency. I anticipate criticism; but however unfavorable I trust that my sincerity will not be called into question.

I believed that a husband must necessarily be an angel, impossible of corruption or contamination.