Jeannette Rankin Quotes

If I had my life to live over, I would do it all again, but this time I would be nastier.

You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake.

I may be the first woman member of Congress, but I won’t be the last.

Men and women are like right and left hands: it doesn't make sense not to use both.

I worked for suffrage for years, and got it. I've worked for peace for 55 years and haven't come close.

We're half the people; we should be half the Congress.

The greatest threat to peace is the barrage of rightist propaganda portraying war as decent, honorable, and patriotic.

The individual woman is required . . . a thousand times a day to choose either to accept her appointed role and thereby rescue her good disposition out of the wreckage of her self-respect, or else follow an independent line of behavior and rescue her self-respect out of the wreckage of her good disposition.

You take people as far as they will go, not as far as you would like them to go.

Go! Go! Go! It makes no difference where, just so you go! go! go! Remember, at the first opportunity, go!

There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense; for war is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

Men are not killed because they get mad at each other. They're killed because one of them has a gun in any dispute.

Killing more people won't help matters.

As a woman I can't go to war, and I refuse to send anyone else.

The most disappointing feature of working for a cause is that so few people have a philosophy of life. We used to say, in the suffrage movement, that we could trust the woman who believed in suffrage, but we could never trust the woman who just wanted to vote.

Establish democracy at home, based on human rights as superior to property rights. . . .

War is the slaughter of human beings, temporarily regarded as enemies, on as large a scale as possible.

What one decides to do in crisis depends on one's philosophy of life, and that philosophy cannot be changed by an incident. If one hasn't any philosophy in crises, others make the decision.

Small use it will be to save democracy for the race if we cannot save the race for democracy.

There can be no compromise with war.

It is unconscionable that 10,000 boys have died in Vietnam. If 10,000 American women had mind enough they could end the war, if they were committed to the task, even if it meant going to jail.

I want to stand by my country, but I cannot vote for war.