A Quote by Ellen Key

Social motherliness has made women's struggle for liberty the loveliest synthesis of egoism and altruism.

Ellen Key

Quote Topics

Women Altruism Egoism Liberty Made Social Struggle Synthesis

Quote Author

Ellen Key
Swedish - Writer
December 11, 1849 - April 25, 1926

The semimetaphysical problems of the individual and society, of egoism and altruism, of freedom and determinism, either disappear or remain in the form of different phases in the organization of a consciousness that is fundamentally social.

Margaret Mead

Human altruism which is not egoism, is sterile.

Marcel Proust

Women have a hard time of it in this world. They are oppressed by man-made laws, man-made social customs, masculine egoism, the delusion of masculine superiority. Their one comfort is the assurance that, even though it may be impossible to prevail against man, it is always possible to enslave and torture a man.

H. L. Mencken

In brief, egoism in its modern interpretation, is the antithesis, not of altruism, but of idealism.

John Buchanan Robinson

In the development of mankind as a whole, just as in individuals, love alone acts as the civilizing factor in the sense that it brings a change from egoism to altruism.

Sigmund Freud

Women's struggle for equality worldwide is about more than equality between men and women. Our struggle is about reversing the trends of social, economic, political, and ecological crisis - a global nervous breakdown! Our struggle is about creating sustainable lives and attainable dreams.

Bella Abzug

While the struggle for religious liberty had proceeded without large-scale bloodshed in New England and elsewhere in the United States, the struggle for political liberty had not fared so well.

Paul P. Harris

By consequence I hold that no one ever did, or can do, anything for "society."... Comte invented the term altruism as an antonym for egoism, and it found its way at once into everyone's mouth, although it is utterly devoid of meaning, since it points to nothing that ever existed in mankind; This hybrid or rather this degenerate form of hedonism served powerfully to invest collectivism's principles with a specious moral sanction, and collectivists naturally made the most of it.

Albert J. Nock

I was born in Tehran at a time when women's rights were deteriorating at a rampant rate. My parents didn't want to raise their daughter in a social, political, and religious climate that was growing increasingly oppressive toward women and girls, so they emigrated to London. But the struggle of the Iranian people was permanently etched in my social consciousness from a young age.

Nazanin Boniadi

You seem cynical because you're always talking about that selfish behavior that's dressed up as altruism. It doesn't mean there isn't altruism. It just means that it's harder to make jokes about altruism.

Stephen Colbert

Egoism , which is the moving force of the world, and altruism , which is its morality , these two contradictory instincts , of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism.

Joseph Conrad

Tenderness has created the first 'social order' - that of the mother with her offspring. Through motherliness, woman later makes her great contributions to civilization.

Ellen Key

To be successful in struggle requires remembrance of the Creator and the doing of good deeds. This is important because successful struggle demands that there be a kind of social consciousness. There has to be a social commitment, a social consciousness that joins men together.

H. Rap Brown

When Nietzsche praises egoism it is always in an aggressive or polemical way, against the virtues, against the virtue of disinterestedness (Z III "Of the three evil things"). But in fact egoism is a bad interpretation of the will, just as atomism is a bad interpretation of force. In order for there to be egoism it is necessary for there to be an ego.