By Blanche Wiesen Cook. This was an amazing book. Before reading it, I knew very little about ER, women's suffrage, or that era of history. There were so many amazing quotes. Most of them I will list here without explanation. They usually speak for themselves.
"Even when young people became disrespectful and started using foul language, ER remained completely unruffled. She used to say, 'There are only two unacceptable four-letter words, Hate and Wars.'"
"J. Edgar Hoover kept a running record of ER's every word and activity from 1924 until her death. Indeed, ER's vast FBI file is one of the wonders of modern history."
"She never gave up on life; she never stopped learning and changing. She worked to transform our world in behalf of greater dignity and more security for all people, for women and men in equal measure."
"There is no more liberating, no more exhilarating experience than to determine one's position, state it bravely, and then act boldly...Action creates it's own courage; and courage is as contagious as fear."
"Learning and living. But they are really the same thing, aren't they? There is no experience from which you can't learn something... and the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience. You can do that only if you have curiosity, an unquenchable spirit of adventure. The experience can have meaning only if you understand it. You can understand it only if you have arrived at some knowledge of yourself, a knowledge based on a deliberately and usually painfully acquired self-discipline, which teaches you to cast out fear and frees you for the fullest experience of the adventure of life...I honor the human race. When it faces life head-on, it can almost remake itself."
"What would happen if one woman told the truth about herself? The world would split open." Muriel Rukeyser
"The issue of sex and power is assumed to be central to the lives of great men. When looking at the lives of great women, we continue to divide the world into saints and sinners, and we make assumptions based on race and class, even looks."
"When a subject is highly controversial - and any question about sex is that - One cannot hope to tell the truth. One can only show how one came to hold whatever opinion one does hold." Virginia Woolf.
"'If you have to compromise, compromise up!' ER personally carried her commitment to liberty, individual freedom, equal rights, civil rights, and human dignity into tiny villages and hamlets as well as into the citadels of government authority."
"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"
"Where after all do human rights begin? In small places, close to home - so close and so small that they cannot be seen on any maps of the world. Yet they are the world of the individual persons; the neighborhood, the school or college, the factory, farm, or office. Such are the places where every man, woman, and child seeks equal justice, equal opportunity, equal dignity without discrimination. Unless these rights have meaning there, they have little meaning anywhere. Without concerned citizen action to uphold them close to home, we shall look in vain for progress in the larger world."
"It has always seemed to me that we never present our case to the smaller nations in either a persuasive or interesting way. I think most people will acknowledge that we have given far more military aid to these nations than economic aid. It is not very pleasant to palm off this military equipment on people who are not really looking for it. In view of this, why don't we offer them something they really want? For one thing, most of them would like food. Many of them know that wider training of their people is essential and hence a primary need is aid to their education system."
"One must never turn one's back on life. There is so much to do, so many engrossing challenges, so many heartbreaking and pressing needs."
"The most important thing in any relationship is not what you get, but what you give."
"Every child should read the translations of Chinese and Indian poetry. We know too little of the thought of these far distant races and the beauty of imagery in which they hide their precious kernels of thought and philosophy."
"Patriarchal Victorian society was a time when education was, in more mundane circles, considered dangerous to a woman's mental health, the pathway to madness and sterility. Independent and creative education for women was also thought to be dangerous to society. It would lead to votes for women, public activity, socialism, agnosticism, utopianism, opposition to war, the dissolution of empire. It was positively subversive. Marie Souvestre entertained it all."
"A passionate humanist committed to social justice, Marie Souvestre inspired young women to think about leadership, to think for themselves, and above all, to think about a nobler, more decent future. To her mind, nothing was dull, no subject irrelevant. Everything creative and imaginative was encouraged. She would not, however, abide dull thoughts, dull thinkers, lazy or boorish girls who wasted their talents and abused their dreams."
"Father always wanted to be the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral." Alice Roosevelt about her father Teddy.
"I was not a snob, largely because I never really thought about the question of why you asked people to your house or claimed them as friends. I found that almost everyone had something interesting to contribute to my education."
"I think I learned then that practically no one in the world is entirely bad or entirely good, and that motives are often more important than actions... I have gradually come to believe that human beings that try to judge other human beings are undertaking a somewhat difficult job."
"Revolution was met by counterrevolution and reaction. Repression greeted every movement for social change. In the US, a year of tyranny and violence, of Red scare and race riots, called America's constitutional precepts into question. Freedom of speech, press, and assembly was buried in an avalanche of super-patriotism led by vigilante missionaries of a new "Americanism." (Check out more on Palmer Raids, Espionage Act of 1917, Sedition act of 1918)
"Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. The master class has always declared the wars, and the subject class has always fought the battles." Eugene Debs
Not until poverty and injustice are dealt with will the revolutionary threat disappear.
"Let us consecrate ourselves to put war out of this world...Men were born by instinct to slay. It seems to me God is giving a call to the women of the world to come forward, to stay the hand of men, to say: 'No, you shall no longer kill your fellow man!'" (Carrie Chapman Catt)
(read more about the Bok peace award)
"If anyone were to ask me what I want out of life I would say - the opportunity for doing something useful, for in no other way, I am convinced, true happiness be obtained."
"Education only ends with death"
"To bring children up with a conception that their own particular lives are typical of the whole world is to bring up extraordinarily narrow people."
"A state is civilized which has the greatest proportion of happy, healthy, wise and gentle people... In a community of one-hundred every one counts, but none too much; thus each girl begins to appreciate her importance not only as an individual but also as a member of a group. Because she has a responsibility, the way she lives becomes important, what she is doing is significant not only for herself but for others." Todhunter School statement of purpose (ER taught there)
"ER believed that a good teacher started with her students' own interests and led them 'into an enlivened understanding of every possible phase of the world into which they are going.' It was the teacher's 'function to manage this relating process, to seize all opportunities, however unpromising, to make history and literature and the seemingly barren study of the machinery of government somehow akin to the things the pupils are doing in their daily life.'"
"ER persuaded her students to develop their talents, to be responsible for their lives, to seek opportunity and achieve success, to care about and work for their communities."
"It is nice to hand out milk and bread. It gives you a comfortable feeling inside. But fundamentally you are not relieving the reasons why you have a charity."
"A state ruled wholly by the self-interest of a few cannot be just."
"I'm a middle-aged woman. It's good to be middle-aged. Things don't matter so much. You don't take it so hard when things happen to you that you don't like."
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