Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

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.

Life is a verb, not a noun.

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 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.

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

Love grows by service.

We all need one another; much and often. Just as every human creature needs a place to be alone in, a sacred, private "home" of his own, so all human creatures need a place to be together in, from the two who can show each other their souls uninterruptedly, to the largest throng that can throb and stir in unison.

The child learns more of the virtues needed in modern life-of fairness, of justice, of comradeship, of collective interest and action-in a common school than can be taught in the most perfect family circle

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

If a woman is really injured by her marriage, she should sue under the employer liability act. She should claim damages--not alimony.

[Warfare is] maleness in its absurdest extremes. Here is to be studied the whole gamut of basic masculinity, from the initial instinct of combat, through every form of glorious ostentation, with the loudest accompaniment of noise.

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

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 the mother of the race is free, we shall have a better world, by the easy right of birth and by the calm, slow, friendly forces of evolution.

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.

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.

In New York City, everyone is an exile, none more so than the Americans.

The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society - more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

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

Only as we live, think, feel, and work outside the home, do we become humanly developed, civilized, socialized.

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

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 softest, freest, most pliable and changeful living substance is the brain-the hardest and most iron-bound as well.

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

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 most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

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.

Concepts antedate facts.

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.

So when the great word "Mother!" rang once more, I saw at last its meaning and its place; Not the blind passion of the brooding past, But Mother -- the World's Mother -- come at last, To love as she had never loved before -- To feed and guard and teach the human race.

Never in all her life had she imagined that this idolized millinery could look, to those who paid for it, like the decorations of an insane monkey.

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

The people people have for friends Your common sense appall But the people people marry Are the queerest folk of all.

Habits of thought persist through the centuries; and while a healthy brain may reject the doctrine it no longer believes, it will continue to feel the same sentiments formerly associated with that doctrine.

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

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.

Death is the essential condition of life, not an evil.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

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

Said I, in scorn all burning hot,In rage and anger high,"You ignominious idiot,Those wings are made to fly!

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

The peculiarity of all death-based religions is that their subject-matter is entirely outside of facts. Men could think and think, talk and argue, advance, deny, assert, and controversy, and write innumerable books, without being hampered at any time by any fact.

Until we see what we are, we cannot take steps to become what we should be.

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

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

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

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

It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.

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