Just as little as terror – not even the terror of war – can save the world, just as little can hate ever be anything uplifting. Love is the only firm ground for peace – not only love for one’s fellowmen, but first of all, love of one’s country. Ellen Key Read Quote
In order to overcome the spirit that creates war, mothers must begin in the tender years of childhood to teach children that right must be the foundation of all might, that authority can be exercised without the help of fists. Ellen Key Read Quote
The simplest formula for the new conception of morality, which is beginning to be opposed to the moral dogma still esteemed by all society, but especially by the women, might be summed up in these words: Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love. Ellen Key Read Quote
The ever clearer consciousness that love can dispense with marriage, yet marriage cannot dispense with love, is already partially recognized by modern society, by the facility of divorce. Ellen Key Read Quote
To burn the ideal of a great love into the soul of youth in letters of fire – that is to give him a real moral strength. Ellen Key Read Quote
Certainly it may, under present imperfect conditions, often be a duty not to destroy the outward form of marriage for the sake of the children. But by no means can this duty be preached as universally binding. Ellen Key Read Quote
Countless are the women parasites who, to satisfy their craving for pleasure and luxury, impoverish father or husband. These lame limbs in the social organism, which themselves accomplish nothing, but for whom all other limbs work, are the most flagrant example of womanly immorality in the present. Ellen Key Read Quote
Altered social conditions may remove certain ailments and deformities in existing society. But the new and more beautiful society will not be formed exclusively – or even mainly – by improved conditions, but above all by more perfect human beings. Ellen Key Read Quote
The storm and stress period of women and the new social and psychological formations thereby entailed must indeed extend far into the twentieth century. This period of conflict will cease only when woman within and out of marriage shall have received legal equality with man. Ellen Key Read Quote
The havoc wrought by war, which one compares with the havoc wrought by nature, is not an unavoidable fate before which man stands helpless. The natural forces that are the cause of war are human passions, which it lies in our power to change. What are culture and civilization if not the taming of blind forces within us as well as in nature? Ellen Key Read Quote
