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

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?

There is no relation more intimately personal than that of parents to the child they have brought into the world; and there is therefore no relationship in which the community should be slower to interfere.

No human being, man, woman, or child, may safely be entrusted to the power of another; for no human being may safely be trusted with absolute power.

the desire to enforce our own moral and spiritual criteria upon posterity is quite as strong as the desire to enforce them upon contemporaries.

. . . 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.