1855 Quotes

“... on May 1, 1855, Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell were married. Before the minister began the ceremony, Henry read the protest which he and Lucy had prepared: "While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relation of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it a duty to declare this act ... implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to, such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent, rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess”

“Urge and urge and urge,Always the procreant urge of the world.”

“Stop this day and night with me and you shall possess the origin of all poems,You shall possess the good of the earth and sun.... there are millions of suns left,You shall no longer take things at second or third hand.... nor look through the eyes of the dead.... nor feed on the spectres in books,You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,You shall listen to all sides and filter them from yourself.”

“I do not snivel that snivel the world over,That months are vacuums and the ground but wallow and filth,That life is a suck and a sell, and nothing remains at the end but threadbare crape and tears.”

“Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that 'all men are created equal.' We now practically read it, 'all men are created equal, except negroes.' When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read, 'all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and Catholics.' When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretense of loving liberty—to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocrisy.”