Olympe de Gouges Quotes
Olympe de Gouges, born Marie Gouze, was a French playwright and political philosopher of the Revolution, the author of the 1791 Declaration of the Rights of Woman and of the Female Citizen. Modeled on the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man, her Declaration argued in seventeen articles that the same natural rights belong without distinction to women and that the law must therefore reach women too. The quotes below are attributed to Olympe de Gouges, organized by topic.
Olympe de Gouges on Freedom
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“Woman is born free and lives equal to man in her rights.”
Declaration of the Rights of Woman -
Attributed to Olympe de Gouges:
“If a woman has the right to mount the scaffold, she must equally have the right to mount the rostrum.”
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Attributed to Olympe de Gouges:
“The exercise of natural rights has no limits except those that the natural rights of others impose upon it.”
Olympe de Gouges on Justice
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“Marriage is a tomb of trust and love. The married woman can with impunity give bastards to her husband, and also give them the wealth which does not belong to them. The woman who is unmarried has only one feeble right; ancient and inhuman laws refuse to her for her children the impossibility on my part to try to give my sex an honorable and just consistency, I leave it to men to attain glory for dealing with this matter; but while we wait, the way can be prepared through national education, the restoration of morals, and conjugal conventions.”
Postscript -
“Man, are you capable of being just? It is a woman who poses the question, you will not deprive her of that right at least. Tell me, what gives you sovereign over empire to oppress my sex? Your strength? Your talents?”
The Rights of Women
Olympe de Gouges on Knowledge
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“Man alone has raised his exceptional circumstances to a principle. Bizarre, blind, bloated with science and degenerated - in a century of enlightenment and wisdom - into the crassest ignorance, he wants to command as a despot a sex which is in full possession of its intellectual faculties; he pretends to enjoy the Revolution and to claim his rights to equality in order to say nothing more about it.”
The Rights of Women
Olympe de Gouges on Politics
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Attributed to Olympe de Gouges:
“A constitution is the work of all hands, or it is the work of none.”
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Attributed to Olympe de Gouges:
“The forgetting of women's rights is the cause of public misfortune and of the corruption of governments.”