Lucretia Mott Quotes

“Throughout her life, Mott criticized those who represented man-made rules as Divine truth, using religious authority to enforce their private interests and personal opinions.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

“Though it would become fashionable for nineteenth-century feminists in other denominations to drop the promise of obedience in marriage vows, there was no such clause in the Quaker ceremony, because there was no, in Lucretia's words, 'assumed authority or admitted inferiority; no promise of obedience.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

“In Stanton, Mott won a devoted convert. Elizabeth recalled: 'It seemed to me like meeting a being from some larger planet, to find a woman who dared to question the opinions of Popes, Kings, Synods, Parliaments, with the same freedom she would criticize an editorial in the London Times, recognizing no higher authority than the judgment of a pure-minded, educated woman. When I first heard from the lips of Lucretia Mott that I had the same right to think for myself that Luther, Calvin, and John Knox had, and the same right to be guided by my own convictions, and would no doubt live a higher, happier life than if guided by theirs, I felt at once a new-born sense of dignity and freedom; it was like suddenly coming into the rays of the noon-day sun, after wandering with a rushlight in the caves of the earth.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

“Mott saw anti-slavery, peace, and women's rights as part of the same reform impulse to liberate the individual from the bonds of tradition, custom, and organized religion.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America

“Lucretia was buried next to James in a simple Quaker grave in Fair Hill cemetery. Thousands of people attended her internment. As her granddaughter remembered, everyone was quiet. Someone asked, 'Will no one say anything?' Another replied, 'Who can speak? The preacher is dead.”
― Carol Faulkner, Lucretia Mott's Heresy: Abolition and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America