Quotes from Emmeline Pankhurst

Trust in God - she will provide.

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.

The English prison system is altogether mediaeval and outworn. In some of its details, the system has improved since they began to send the Suffragettes to Holloway. I may say that we, by our public denunciation of the system, have forced these slight improvements.

Justice and judgment lie often a world apart.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

...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?

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

I thought I had been a suffragist before I became a Poor Law Guardian, but now I began to think about the vote in women's hands not only as a right but as a desperate necessity.

I have made speeches urging women to adopt methods of rebellion such as have been adopted by men in every revolution.

I have not personally suffered from the deprivations, the bitterness and sorrow which bring so many men and women to a realisation of social injustice.

How different the reasoning is that men adopt when they are discussing the cases of men and those of women.

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.

There is something that Governments care for far more than human life, and that is the security of property, and so it is through property that we shall strike the enemy. Be militant each in your own way. I incite this meeting to rebellion.

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

My parents, especially my father, discussed the question of my brothers' education as a matter of real importance. My education and that of my sister were scarcely discussed at all.

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.