Life & Wisdom Quote by Rebecca H. Davis

It lands like an earnest confession, then quietly turns into a sideways critique of who gets to speak in public. Rebecca H. Davis frames “preach a sermon” and “edit a newspaper” as twin megaphones of moral authority: the pulpit and the press. She’s not daydreaming about fame; she’s naming the two socially sanctioned jobs that convert private conviction into communal influence. The sting is in the clause that follows: “if I only had the chance.” Capability isn’t the issue. Access is.

As a writer, Davis is also being sly about labor and legitimacy. Preaching and editing aren’t just “things one can do”; they’re offices, gate-kept roles with institutional backing. By claiming she could do them “with credit to myself and benefit to the world,” she adopts the language of civic duty and respectable self-making, the idiom of a culture that demanded women (and many outsiders) justify ambition as service. The phrase “always felt” signals long-held certainty, not a passing whim, which makes the denial of opportunity feel structural rather than unlucky.

The context, too, matters: sermons and newspapers were 19th-century engines of public opinion, shaping politics, morals, and social reform. Davis positions herself at the center of that machinery while acknowledging she’s kept at its margins. The quote works because it balances confidence with constraint, letting the reader hear both voices at once: the competent professional and the citizen told to stay a spectator.