Ellen Key Quotes
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When the crying child is immediately isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever annoys others must not be with them, if this isolation is the absolute result and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable.
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The work of popular education, the temperance movement, the peace movement, are to a great extent carried on by the young. Their meetings show that the young understand one of their tasks: that of bringing together the different classes through social intercourse.
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The storm and stress period of women and the new social and psychological formations thereby entailed must indeed extend far into the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with man.
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No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others.
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Unless one believes in a superhuman reason which directs evolution, one is bound to believe in a reason inherent in humanity, a motive power transcending that of each separate people, just as the power of the organism transcends that of the organ. This reason increases in proportion as the unity of mankind becomes established.
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The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
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Art, that great undogmatized church.
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The art of living demands that our interest in bringing forth flowers in our family life equal the interest we take in bringing them forth in our window gardens. So long as their home-life aesthetics have not become ethics, women need not expect husbands, children, or servants to feel happy in the homes of their creation.
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In every new generation, the impulses supposed to have been rooted out by discipline in the child break forth again when the struggle for existence - of the individual in society, of the society in the life of the state - begins. These passions are not transformed by the prevalent education of the day, but only repressed.
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To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire - that is to give him a real moral strength.
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The married woman as family provider beside the man, often also in place of the man, but always however subservient to the man's dominion - this is the worst form of woman slavery our time has created.
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Socialism and the woman movement are two mighty streams which drag along with them great parts of the firm formations which they touch.
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The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.
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War can be prevented only by broad-minded statesmanship - a statesmanship that understands how to enlist people's interests in a leading cause.
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While the women of the older generation were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining 'a work and a duty,' however monotonous and wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a pleasurable labour has fortunately increased.
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On the whole, the experience that the activity of the soul obeys the law of least resistance has been verified even in regard to women's social morals. As a rule, these have been focused on the family and on charity - among other reasons, because woman's sense of duty seldom finds means of expression in other directions.
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The woman pastor would often be, especially for women and children, a better minister than the clergyman; for them also, the woman judge might often surpass the man in penetration and understanding.
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At present, the most effective way of preventing war would be for statesmen to direct politics so as to support a sound nationalism. This leads to concordance between people of kindred race and languages, whereas the conquest and coercion of people of different race and language inevitably lead to new wars.
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In order to overcome the spirit that creates war, mothers must begin in the tender years of childhood to teach children that right must be the foundation of all might, that authority can be exercised without the help of fists.
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The condition of all development is not to be content with the present, but to have the courage to ask how everything can be made better and the good fortune to find a right answer to this question in thought or in action.
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Altered social conditions may remove certain ailments and deformities in existing society. But the new and more beautiful society will not be formed exclusively - or even mainly - by improved conditions, but above all by more perfect human beings.
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The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature?
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The educator wants the child to be finished at once and perfect. He forces upon the child an unnatural degree of self-mastery, a devotion to duty, a sense of honour - habits that adults get out of with astonishing rapidity.
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It is not sufficient for the young to devote their enthusiasm, their courage, their ambition, their self-sacrifice to the great ideas of the time; the young must not only preserve but increase their powers if they are to be really equal to their eternal task: that of drawing the age in advance.