Elizabeth Blackwell Quotes

To her [Florence Nightingale] chiefly I owed the awakening to the fact that sanitation is the supreme goal of medicine its foundation and its crown.

The excuse or toleration of cruelty upon any living creature by a woman is a deadly sin against the grandest force in nature - maternal love ... In not a single instance known to science has the cure of any human disease resulted necessarily from this fallacious method of research.

Prejudice is more violent the blinder it is ...

It is not easy to be a pioneer - but oh, it is fascinating! I would not trade one moment, even the worst moment, for all the riches in the world.

The idea of winning a doctor's degree gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.

The gross perversion and destruction of motherhood by the abortionist filled me with indignation, and awakened active antagonism. That the honorable term 'female physician' should be exclusively applied to those women who carried on this shocking trade seemed to me a horror. It was an utter degradation of what might and should become a noble position for women.

[On sex:] ... the total deprivation of it produces irritability.

I felt more than ever the necessity of my mission. But I went home out of spirits, I hardly know why. I must work by myself all life long.

For what is done or learned by one class of women becomes, by virtue of their common womanhood, the property of all women.

Love, Hope, and Reverence are realities of a different order from the senses, but they are positive and constant facts, always active, always working out mighty changes in human life.

It is a well-established fact that in healthy loving women, uninjured by the too frequent lesions which result from childbirth, increasing physical satisfaction attaches to the ultimate physical expression of love ... Love between the sexes is the highest and mightiest form of human sexual passion.

It is well worth the efforts of a lifetime to have attained knowledge which justifies an attack on the root of all evil ... which asserts that because forms of evil have always existed in society, therefore they must always exist.

I do not wish to give (women) a first place, still less a second one- but the complete freedom to take their true place, whatever it may be.

...I awoke with a renewed understanding of why it is wise to retire to bed come nightfall. For evil thoughts take strength from the dark, while hope thrives in the light.

If society will not admit of woman's free development, then society must be remodeled.

I, who so love a hermit life for a good part of the day, find myself living in public, and almost losing my identity.