Emmeline Pankhurst Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“I was fourteen years old when I went to my first suffrage meeting. Returning from school one day, I met my mother just setting out for the meeting, and I begged her to let me go along.”

“Not by the forces of civil war can you govern the very weakest woman. You can kill that woman, but she escapes you then; you cannot govern her. No power on earth can govern a human being, however feeble, who withholds his or her consent.”

“Window-breaking, when Englishmen do it, is regarded as honest expression of political opinion. Window-breaking, when Englishwomen do it, is treated as a crime.”

“Every principle of liberty enunciated in any civilized country on earth, with very few exceptions, was intended entirely for men, and when women tried to force the putting into practice of these principles, for women, then they discovered they had come into a very, very unpleasant situation indeed.”

“Manchester is a city which has witnessed a great many stirring episodes, especially of a political character. Generally speaking, its citizens have been liberal in their sentiments, defenders of free speech and liberty of opinion.”

“I suppose I had always been an unconscious suffragist. With my temperament and my surroundings, I could scarcely have been otherwise.”

“The whole argument with the anti-suffragists, or even the critical suffragist man, is this: that you can govern human beings without their consent.”

“The argument of the broken window pane is the most valuable argument in modern politics.”

“When you have warfare, things happen; people suffer; the noncombatants suffer as well as the combatants. And so it happens in civil war.”

“One does not expect to be comfortable in prison. As a matter of fact, one's mental suffering is so much greater than any common physical distress that the latter is almost forgotten.”