Ellen Key Quotes
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The current of emotion, which was formerly directed to gaining eternal bliss, is turned in socialism - in the same degree as the latter is permeated by evolutionism - towards the perfecting of earthly life.
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Children must be impressed with the fact that the greatest heroes are those who fight to help others, not those who fight for power or glory. They must be made to understand that victory does not prove that the thing fought for is right, nor that defeat proves that a cause is wrong.
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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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Lack of courage or means often deters the European woman from more independent business activity, and this in spite of increasing freedom to choose her occupation, in spite of brilliant examples of successful undertakings of women, in photography, hotel or boarding-house management, dress-making, etc.
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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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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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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 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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It is not a dream that someday, nations will be able to settle their difficulties without war, just as individuals now settle their personal feuds without resorting to arguments of physical strength or sharp steel. For, then, humanity will have created international jurisdiction and a power to enforce its laws.
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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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The present practice is to impress one's own discoveries, opinions and principles on the child by constantly directing his actions. The last thing to be realised by the educator is that he really has before him an entirely new soul, a real self whose first and chief right is to think over the things with which he comes in contact.
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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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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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How the woman movement has elevated woman's work, since it has raised the standard of qualification in many fields and increased the feeling of responsibility in all!
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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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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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Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.
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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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Happiness lies so far from man, but he must begin by daring to will it.
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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 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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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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Art, that great undogmatized church.