It is better to have the power of self-protection than to depend on any man, whether he be the Governor in his chair of State, or the hunted outlaw wandering through the night, hungry and cold and with murder in his heart.
ATTRIBUTION:
Lillie Devereux Blake (1835–1913), U.S. suffragist. As quoted in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 4, ch. 2, by Susan B. Anthony and Ida Husted Harper (1902).
In a speech entitled “The Unknown Quantity in Politics,” delivered at an 1884 convention of the National Woman Suffrage Association; Blake was a delegate from New York.
