SUZANNE LA FOLLETTE

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

Motherhood, to be sure, receives a great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly masculine society. Per se it is accorded no respect whatever. When it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child - an ostracism and obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father does not share.

real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the disappearance of advantage, and primarily of economic advantage.

Where is the society that does not struggle along under the dead weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfathers.

Laws are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them.

Rights that depend on the sufferance of the State are of uncertain tenure.

When once a social order is well established, no matter what injustice it involves, those who occupy a position of advantage are not long in coming to believe that it is the only possible and reasonable order.

When one hears the argument that marriage should be indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood.

People never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live.

. . . nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction.

What its children become, that will the community become.

It is necessary to grow accustomed to freedom before one may walk in it sure-footedly.

Rights that depend on the sufferance of the State are of uncertain tenure.

Where is the society that does not struggle along under the dead weight of tradition and law inherited from its grandfathers.

under a monopolistic economic system the opportunity to earn a living by one's labour comes to be regarded as a privilege instead of a natural right. Women are simply held to be less entitled to this privilege than men.

People never move towards revolution; they are pushed towards it by intolerable injustices in the economic and social order under which they live.

There is no relation more intimately personal than that of parents to the child they have brought into the world; and there is therefore no relationship in which the community should be slower to interfere.

The worst effect of tutelage is that it negates self-discipline, and therefore people suddenly released from it are almost bound to make fools of themselves.

Until economic freedom is attained for everybody, there can be no real freedom for anybody.

Motherhood, to be sure, receives a great deal of sentimental adulation, but only if it is committed in accordance with rules which have been prescribed by a predominantly masculine society. Per se it is accorded no respect whatever. When it results from a sexual relationship which has been duly sanctioned by organized society, it is holy, no matter how much it may transgress the rules of decency, health, or common sense. Otherwise it is a sin meriting social ostracism for the mother and obloquy for the child - an ostracism and obloquy, significantly enough, in which the father does not share.

There is nothing more innately human than the tendency to transmute what has become customary into what has been divinely ordained.

real freedom is not a matter of the shifting of advantage from one sex to the other or from one class to another. Real freedom means the disappearance of advantage, and primarily of economic advantage.

When once a social order is well established, no matter what injustice it involves, those who occupy a position of advantage are not long in coming to believe that it is the only possible and reasonable order.

No human being, man, woman, or child, may safely be entrusted to the power of another; for no human being may safely be trusted with absolute power.

If experience teaches anything, it is that what the community undertakes to do is usually done badly. This is due in part to the temptation to corruption that such enterprises involve, but even more, perhaps, to the lack of personal interest on the part of those engaged in them.

the desire to enforce our own moral and spiritual criteria upon posterity is quite as strong as the desire to enforce them upon contemporaries.

The revolutionists did not succeed in establishing human freedom; they poured the new wine of belief in equal rights for all men into the old bottle of privilege for some; and it soured.

If responsibility for the upbringing of children is to continue to be vested in the family, then the rights of children will be secured only when parents are able to make a living for their families with so little difficulty that they may give their best thought and energy to the child's development and the problem of helping it adjust itself to the complexities of the modern environment.

When one hears the argument that marriage should be indissoluble for the sake of children, one cannot help wondering whether the protagonist is really such a firm friend of childhood.

Most people, no doubt, when they espouse human rights, make their own mental reservations about the proper application of the word "human."

Laws are felt only when the individual comes into conflict with them.

. . . nothing could be more grotesquely unjust than a code of morals, reinforced by laws, which relieves men from responsibility for irregular sexual acts, and for the same acts drives women to abortion, infanticide, prostitution, and self-destruction.

All political and religious systems have their root and their strength in the innate conservatism of the human mind, and its intense fear of autonomy.