Emmeline Pankhurst Quotes

I would rather be a rebel than a slave.

We have to free half of the human race, the women, so that they can help free the other half.

You must make women count as much as men; you must have an equal standard of morals; and the only way to enforce that is through giving women political power so that you can get that equal moral standard registered in the laws of the country. It is the only way.

Better that we should die fighting than be outraged and dishonored... Better to die than to live in slavery.

We woman suffragists have a great mission - the greatest mission the world has ever known. It is to free half the human race, and through that freedom to save the rest.

A defiant deed has greater value than unnumerable thousands of words.

Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs.

You have to make more noise than anybody else, you have to make yourself more obtrusive than anybody else, you have to fill all the papers more than anybody else, in fact you have to be there all the time and see that they do not snow you under.

One baby is a patient baby, and waits indefinitely until its mother is ready to feed it. The other baby is an impatient baby and cries lustily, screams and kicks and makes everybody unpleasant until it is fed. Well, we know perfectly well which baby is attended to first. That is the whole history of politics.

Women had always fought for men, and for their children. Now they were ready to fight for their own human rights. Our militant movement was established.

Trust in God - she will provide.

...the Government must not think that they can stop this agitation. It will go on...We are here not because we are law-breakers; we are here in out efforts to become law-makers.

What is the use of fighting for a vote if we have not got a country to vote in?

If it is right for men to fight for their freedom, and God knows what the human race would be like today if men had not, since time began, fought for their freedom, then it is right for women to fight for their freedom and the freedom of the children they bear.

There is something that governments care for more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy.... Those of you who can break windows--break them. Those of you who can still further attack the secret idol of property, so as to make the Government realize that property is as greatly endangered by women's suffrage as it was by the Chartists of old--do so. And my last word is to the Government: I incite this meeting to rebellion!

I am what you call a hooligan-

I want to say to you who think women cannot succeed, we have brought the government of England to this position, that it has to face this alternative: either women are to be killed or women are to have the vote.

Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it.

Justice and judgment lie often a world apart.

If men will not do us justice, they shall do us violence.

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

Those men and women are fortunate who are born at a time when a great struggle for human freedom is in progress.

The militancy of men, through all the centuries, has drenched the world with blood. The militancy of women has harmed no human life save the lives of those who fought the battle of righteousness.

As long as women consent to be unjustly governed, they will be; but directly women say: "We withhold our consent," we will not be governed any longer as long as government is unjust.

[To the heckler who said, 'If you were my wife I'd poison you':] No, you wouldn't. I'd do it myself.