Top 127 Quotes & Sayings by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

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.

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.

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

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

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

New York - that unnatural city where every one is an exile, none more so than the American.

To attain happiness in another world we need only to believe something, while to secure it in this world we must do something.

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.

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

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.

A concept is stronger than a fact.

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

There is no female mind. The brain is not an organ of sex. As well speak of a female liver.

Eternity is not something that begins after you're dead. It is going on all the time. We are in it now.

Exciting literature after supper is not the best digestive.

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

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

[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.

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

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

The most familiar facts are often hardest to understand.

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

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

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

Concepts antedate facts.

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

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

It will be a great thing for the human soul when it finally stops worshipping backwards.

It is not that women are really smaller-minded, weaker-minded, more timid and vacillating, but that whosoever, man or woman, lives always in a small, dark place, is always guarded, protected, directed and restrained, will become inevitably narrowed and weakened by it.

The world is quite right. It does not have to be consistent.

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.

In our steady insistence on proclaiming sex-distinction we have grown to consider most human attributes as masculine attributes, for the simple reason that they were allowed to men and forbidden to women.

For men obsessed with women's underwear, a course in washing, ironing and mending is recommended.

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

To work is not only a right, it is a duty. To work to the full capacity of one's powers is necessary for human development - the full use of one's best faculties - this is the health and happiness for both man and woman.

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

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

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.

Love grows by service.

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.

If only religion could be brought to take an interest in this earthly future, what a help it would be! ... Think of the appeal to the less spiritual of us, to those who never did get enthusiastic about eternity, or care so tenderly about their own souls, yet who could rise to the thought of improving this world for the children they love, and their children after them.

Until mothers earn their livings, women will not

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.

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?

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.

No matter what the belief, if it had modestly said, 'This is our best thought, go on, think farther!' then we could have smoothly outgrown our early errors and long since have developed a religion such as would have kept pace with an advancing world. But we were made to believe and not allowed to think. We were told to obey, rather than to experiment and investigate.

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.

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

A man does not have to stay at home all day, in order to love it; why should a woman?

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

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

To-day there is hardly a woman of intelligence in all America ... who is not definitely and actively concerned in some social interest, who does not recognize some duty besides those incident to her own blood relationship.

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.

I have preferred chloroform to cancer

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

It cannot be too strongly asserted that the insistence on blind, unreasoning faith is due mainly to the maintenance of a subject-matter upon which there was no knowledge, namely the 'other world'; and that this basis was assumed because of early man's preoccupation with death. It is, unfortunately, quite possible to believe a thing which is contradicted by facts, especially if the facts are not generally known; but if the whole position on which we rested our religions had been visibly opposed by what we did know, even the unthinking masses would, in time, have noticed it.

Life is a verb, not a noun.

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

The stony-minded orthodox were right in fearing the first movement of new knowledge and free thought. It has gone on, and will go on, irresistibly, until some day we shall have no respect for an alleged "truth" which cannot stand the full blaze of knowledge, the full force of active thought.