Jeannette Rankin

“It is important for people to be able to read all sides of every question; for a feeling of national unity does not come from one-sided or inadequate information, but from a sense of freedom impartially secured and of opportunity equalized by a just government.”

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

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

“Might it not be that a great force that has always been thinking in terms of human needs, and that always will think in terms of human needs, has not been mobilized? Is it not possible that the women of the country have something of value to give the nation at this time?”

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

“There can be no compromise with war; it cannot be reformed or controlled; cannot be disciplined into decency or codified into common sense.”

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

“I have nothing left but my integrity.”

“The most important accomplishment, I believe, was my voting against the First World War.”

“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.”

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

“We have to get it into our heads once and for all that we cannot settle disputes by eliminating human beings.”

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

“Bribes are not offered in such a way that you can prove them, and in order to prove that I didn't accept a bribe, I had to run.”

“We reasoned that the men would find it difficult to vote against the women in their home states when a woman was sitting with them making laws.”

“How can people in other countries who are trying to grasp our plan of democracy avoid stumbling over our logic when we deny the first steps in democracy to our women?”

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

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

“If you're against war, you're against war regardless of what happens. It's a wrong method of trying to settle a dispute.”