Great Throughts Treasury

"For man, marriage is regarded as a station; for women, as a vocation."

"Laws are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them."

"There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained."

"Real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the disappearance of advantage, and primarily or economic advantage."

"People never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live."

"The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured."

"All political and religious systems have their root and their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and in its intense fear of autonomy."

"No one who has not known the inestimable privilege can possibly realize what good fortune it is to grow up in a home where there are grandparents."

"It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly."

"Most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word ''human.''"

"Nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction"

"What its children become, that will the community become."

"Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody."

"When one hears the argument that marriage should be indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood."

"Where is the society which does not struggle along under a dead-weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfather?"