Sarah Moore Grimke Quotes

I ask no favors for my sex, I surrender not our claim to equality. All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks, and permit us to stand upright on the ground which God has designed us to occupy.

I want my sex to claim nothing from their brethren but what their brethren may justly claim from them.

The virtue of female slaves is wholly at the mercy of irresponsible tyrants, and women are bought and sold in our slave markets, to gratify the brutal lust of those who bear the name of Christians.

There has been a comparatively greater proportion of good queens, than of good kings.

One of the duties which devolve upon women in the present interesting crisis, is to prepare themselves for more extensive usefulness, by making use of those religious and literary privileges and advantages that are within their reach, if they will only stretch out their hands and possess them.

Good and evil, as we term them, are not antagonistic; they are ever found hand in hand. Humanity has never achieved a single conquest without the aid of both. Indeed how can she? What adds to moral strength, but a grappling with temptation?

[On the Adam and Eve story:] They both fell from innocence, and consequently from happiness, but not from equality.

[Women] are early taught that to appear to yield is the only way to govern.

An idea built the wall of separation between the sexes, and an idea will crumble it to dust.

At sixty I look back on a life of deep disappointments, of withered hopes, of unlooked for suffering, of severe discipline.

The reason why women effect so little and are so shallow is because their aims are low, marriage is the prize for which they strive; if foiled in that they rarely rise above disappointment.