Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes - Page 2

I used to lie awake as a child and get more entertainment and terror out of blank walls and plain furniture than most children could find in a toy-store.

When all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.

What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

Death? Why this fuss about death? Use your imagination, try to visualize a world without death! Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

However, one cannot put a quart in a pint cup.

Until mothers earn their livings, women will not

If only religion could be brought to take an interest in this earthly future, what a help it would be! ... Think of the appeal to the less spiritual of us, to those who never did get enthusiastic about eternity, or care so tenderly about their own souls, yet who could rise to the thought of improving this world for the children they love, and their children after them.

To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.

The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.

But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.

I cry at nothing, and cry most of the time.

For men obsessed with women's underwear, a course in washing, ironing and mending is recommended.

One religion after another has accepted and perpetuated man's original mistake in making a private servant of the mother of the race.

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

Concepts antedate facts.

It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards.

It cannot be too strongly asserted that the insistence on blind, unreasoning faith is due mainly to the maintenance of a subject-matter upon which there was no knowledge, namely the 'other world'; and that this basis was assumed because of early man's preoccupation with death. It is, unfortunately, quite possible to believe a thing which is contradicted by facts, especially if the facts are not generally known; but if the whole position on which we rested our religions had been visibly opposed by what we did know, even the unthinking masses would, in time, have noticed it.

The time is approaching when we shall consider it abhorrent to our civilization to allow a human being to die in prolonged agony which we should mercifully end in any other creature.

The one predominant duty is to find one's work and do it.

The mother as a social servant instead of a home servant will not lack in true mother duty. From her work, loved and honored though it is, she will return to her home life, the child life, with an eager, ceaseless pleasure, cleansed of all the fret and fraction and weariness that so mar it now.

Through it [literature] we know the past, govern the present, and influence the future.

As to ethics, unfortunately, we are still at sea. We never did have any popular base for what little ethics we knew, except the religious theories, and now that our faith is shaken in those theories we cannot account for ethics at all. It is no wonder we behave badly, we are literally ignorant of the laws of ethics, which is the simplest of sciences, the most necessary, the most continuously needed. The childish misconduct of our 'revolted youth' is quite equaled by that of older people, and neither young nor old seem to have any understanding of the reasons why conduct is 'good' or 'bad.

Maternal instinct, merely as an instinct, is unworthy of our superstitious reverence.

But I MUST say what I feel and think in some way — it is such a relief! But the effort is getting to be greater than the relief.