Olympe de Gouges Quotes on Justice
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. This page collects quotes attributed to Olympe de Gouges on the topic of justice, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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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.”
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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.”
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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 -
“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