Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

I'm sure I never used to be so sensitive. I think it is due to this nervous condition.

California is a state peculiarly addicted to swift enthusiasms. It is a seed-bed of all manner of cults and theories, taken up, and dropped, with equal speed.

Shall you complain who feed the world? Who clothe the world? Who house the world? Shall you complain who are the world, Of what the world may do? As from this hour You use your power, The world must follow you!

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

What we do modifies us more than what is done to us.

It would have saved trouble had I remained Perkins from the first, this changing of women's names is a nuisance we are now happily outgrowing.

Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether.

The women who do the most work get the least money, and the women who have the most money do the least work.

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

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

The home is the centre and circumference, the start and the finish, of most of our lives.

Now why should that man have fainted? But he did,and right across my path by the wall, so that I had to creep over him every time!

The labor of women in the house, certainly, enables men to produce more wealth than they otherwise could; and in this way women are economic factors in society. But so are horses.

all social relations exist and grow in the human mind. That one despot can rule over a million other men rests absolutely on their state of mind. They believe that he does; let them change their minds, and he does not.

It is the duty of youth to bring fresh new powers to bear on Social progress. Each generation of young people should be to the world like a vast reserve force to a tired army. They should life the world forward. That is what they are for.

If fifty men did all the work, / And gave the price to five, / And let those five make all the rules - / You'd say the fifty men were fools, / Unfit to be alive.

A normal feminine influence in recasting our religious assumptions will do more than any other one thing to improve the world.

A house does not need a wife any more than it needs a husband.

The soaring, imaginative minds of men, constructing lofty, shimmering piles of abstract thought, and taking as their postulate a revelation from God, gaveus relgions which coule not possible maintained without belief and obedience: ... we find them most permanent and changeless among people who make the least effort to swquare their beliefs with the laws of life.

But reason has no power against feeling, and feeling older than history is no light matter.

We grovel and "worship" and pray to God to do what we ourselves ought to have done a thousand years ago, and can do now, as soon as we choose.

The children in this country are the one center and focus of all our thoughts. Every step of our advance is always considered in its effect on them-on the race. You see, we are MOTHERS, she repeated, as if in that she had said it all.

The religious need of the human mind remains alive, never more so, but it demands a teaching which can be understood. Slowly an apprehension of the intimate, usable power of God is growing among us, and a growing recognition of the only worth-while application of that power-in the improvement of the world.

Fine blunderers in ethics we are, so generally conveying to children the basic impression that pleasantness must be wrong, and right doing unpleasant!

If we once admit that our life is here for the purpose of race-improvement, then we question any religion which does not improve the race, or the main force of which evaporates, as it were, directing our best efforts toward the sky.... Improvement in the human race is not accomplished by extracting any number of souls and placing them in heaven, or elsewhere. It must be established on earth, either through achievement in social service, or through better children.

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.

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.

Grateful return for happiness conferred is not the method of exchange in a partnership. The comfort a man takes with his wife is not in the nature of a business partnership, nor are her frugality and industry.

The home is a human institution. All human institutions are open to improvement.

The fact that women in the home have shut themselves away from the thought and life of the world has done much to retard progress.We fill the world with the children of 20th century A.D. fathers and 20th century B.C. mothers.

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.

Eternity is not something that begins after you are dead. It is going on all the time.

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

In a sick society, women who have difficulty fitting in are not ill but demonstrating a healthy and positive response.

It is not for nothing that a man's best friends sigh when he marries, especially if he is a man of genius.

Where young boys plan for what they will achieve and attain, young girls plan for whom they will achieve and attain.

The female of genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.

To speak broadly, the troubles of life as we find them are mainly traceable to the heart or the purse.

And woman should stand beside man as the comrade of his soul, not the servant of his body.

This is the woman's century, the first chance for the mother of the world to rise to her full place . . . and the world waits while she powders her nose.

There should be an end to the bitterness of feeling which has arisen between the sexes in this century.

To swallow and follow, whether old doctrine or new propaganda, is a weakness still dominating the human mind.

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

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

Life is a verb, not a noun.

Specialization and organization are the basis of human progress.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

A man's honor always seems to want to kill a woman to satisfy it.