What Could I Do But Go With

The Surest Test Of Discipline Is Its Absence.

What Armies And How Much Of War I Have Seen, What Thousands Of Marching Troops, What Fields Of Slain, What Prisons, What Hospitals, What Ruins, What Cities In Ashes, What Hunger And Nakedness, What Orphanages, What Widowhood, What Wrongs And What Vengeance.

I Have An Almost Complete Disregard Of Precedent, And A Faith In The Possibility Of Something Better. It Irritates Me To Be Told How Things Have Always Been Done. I Defy The Tyranny Of Precedent. I Go For Anything New That Might Improve The Past.

Others Are Writing My Biography, And Let It Rest As They Elect To Make It. I Have Lived My Life, Well And Ill, Always Less Well Than I Wanted It To Be But It Is, As It Is, And As It Has Been; So Small A Thing, To Have Had So Much About It!

If Woman Alone Had Suffered Under These Mistaken Traditions [of Women's Subordination], If She Could Have Borne The Evil By Herself, It Would Have Been Less Pitiful, But Her Brother Man, In The Laws He Created And Ignorantly Worshipped, Has Suffered With Her. He Has Lost Her Highest Help; He Has Crippled The Intelligence He Needed; He Has Belittled The Very Source Of His Own Being And Dwarfed The Image Of His Maker.