Quotes From Progressive Advocate Lucretia Mott

Lucretia Mott, a Quaker, was known as an antislavery advocate and women's rights activist. Many of her quotes express the feminism, antiracism, and religious sentiments that she became famous for.

Lucretia Mott Quotes on Women's Rights

"The world has never yet seen a truly great and virtuous nation because, in the degradation of women, the very fountains of life are poisoned at their source."

"Let her [woman] receive encouragement for the proper cultivation of all her powers, so that she may enter profitably into the active business of life."

"I grew up so thoroughly imbued with women's rights that it was the most important question of my life from a very early day."

"It is not Christianity, but priestcraft that has subjected woman as we find her."

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Biography of Lucretia Mott

By Jone Johnson Lewis

On Morality

"I have no idea of submitting tamely to injustice inflicted either on me or on the slave. I will oppose it with all the moral powers with which I am endowed. I am no advocate of passivity."

"If our principles are right, why should we be cowards?"

"Liberty is not less a blessing, because oppression has so long darkened the mind that it can not appreciate it."

"My conviction led me to adhere to the sufficiency of the light within us, resting on truth for authority, not on authority for truth."

"We too often bind ourselves by authorities rather than by the truth."

On Christianity

"It is time that Christians were judged more by their likeness to Christ than their notions of Christ. Were this sentiment generally admitted we should not see such tenacious adherence to what men deem the opinions and doctrines of Christ while at the same time in every day practice is exhibited anything but a likeness to Christ."

"The cause of peace has had my share of efforts, taking the ultra non-resistance ground — that a Christian cannot consistently uphold, and actively support, a government based on the sword, or whose ultimate resort is to the destroying weapons."

Quotes About Lucretia Mott

Ralph Waldo Emerson

"She brings domesticity and common sense, and that propriety which every man loves, directly into this hurly-burly, and makes every bully ashamed. Her courage is no merit, one almost says, where triumph is so sure."

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

"Having known Lucretia Mott, not only in the flush of life, when all her faculties were at their zenith but in the repose of advanced age, her withdrawal from our midst seems as natural and as beautiful as the changing foliage of some grand oak from the spring-time to the autumn."