I don’t care if a man’s theory for tomorrow is correct, I care if his spirit of today is correct.
From infancy, almost, the average girl is told that marriage is her ultimate goal; therefore her training and education must be directed toward that end. Like the mute beast fattened for slaughter, she is prepared for that.
The American suffrage movement has been, until very recently, altogether a parlor affair, absolutely detached from the economic needs of the people.
To call the State an organism shows a diseased tendency to make a fetish of words.
The persecution of the innovator and protestant has always been inspired by fear on the part of constituted authority of having its infallibility questioned and its power undermined.
True, we have no conscription; that is, men are not usually forced to enlist in the army, but we have developed a far more exacting and rigid force-necessity.
More pernicious than the power of a dictator is that of a class; the most terrible – the tyranny of a majority.
The import is not the kind of work woman does, but rather the quality of the work she furnishes.
Anarchism, then, really stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion.
The God idea is growing more impersonal and nebulous in proportion as the human mind is learning to understand natural phenomena and in the degree that science progressively correlates human and social events.
How to raise this dead level of theistic belief is really a matter of life and death for all denominations. Therefore their tolerance; but it is a tolerance not of understanding; but of weakness.
Those who sit in a glass house do wrong to throw stones about them; besides, the American glass house is rather thin, it will break easily, and the interior is anything but a gainly sight.
As to a thorough eradication of prostitution, nothing can accomplish that save a complete transvaluation of all accepted values – especially the moral ones – coupled with the abolition of industrial slavery.
It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims.
Mankind has been punished long and heavily for having created its gods; nothing but pain and persecution have been man’s lot since gods began.
Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions.
Modern woman is no longer satisfied to be the beloved of a man; she looks for understanding, comradeship; she wants to be treated as a human being and not simply as an object for sexual gratification.
Out of the chaos the future emerges in harmony and beauty.
It is safe to say that no other superstition is so detrimental to growth, so enervating and paralyzing to the minds and hearts of the people, as the superstition of Morality.
The inhabitants of the other spots reason in like manner, of course, with the result that from early infancy the mind of the child is provided with blood-curdling stories about the Germans, the French, the Italians, Russians, etc.