Susan B Anthony on Optimism

"The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball - the further I am rolled, the more I gain." - Susan B. Anthony

Who said it

Susan B. Anthony is an American civil rights activist campaigning for the equal right of women for suffrage. Anthony devoted her whole life to this endeavor by touring the country and making speeches about women’s right to vote. Anthony has spent 45 years of her life for that goal; eliciting the support of like-minded men and women around the nation and rallying them towards this cause. Anthony’s effort proved to be successful, as the 19th Amendment gave the right of suffrage to women. Her efforts were honored by the government by minting out Susan Anthony dollar coins, which were minted out in the years 1979, 1980, 1981 and 1999.

What it means

As this quote says, age is not a disadvantage if you have some important cause to fight for. Anthony quite sees it the opposite way; the more she went on in age, the more she feels potent and capable of helping the world change for the better. Though her advocacy was decades-long and consumed most of her lifetime, she did not feel powerless or hopeless with her struggle. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it would be the persistence and the optimism that Anthony had with her advocacy and her own powers for enacting the needed change in society and the world in general.