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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

Concepts antedate facts.

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

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

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

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!

Let us inquire what glory there was in an omnipotent being torturing forever a puny little creature who could in no way defend himself? Would it be to the glory of a man to fry ants?

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

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

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

Audiences are always better pleased with a smart retort, some joke or epigram, than with any amount of reasoning.

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

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

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

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.

The best proof of man's dissatisfaction with the home is found in his universal absence from it.

As for mother Eve - I wasn't there and can't deny the story, but I will say this. If she brought evil into the world, we men have had the lion's share of keeping it going ever since.

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.

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.