A new principle cannot be put into effect without bringing with it new mistakes. But we may, however, be convinced that the laws of life - to which belongs the law that suffering follows the misuse of freedom - will finally be able to bring everything within its right limits.

Ellen Key

Education can give you a skill, but a liberal education can give you dignity.

Ellen Key

Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.

Ellen Key

Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.

Ellen Key

When the sense of solidarity has been developed to such a point that each one feels the cause of all others as his own, we shall be drawing near to international and to social peace.

Ellen Key

The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.

Ellen Key

At every step the child should be allowed to meet the real experience of life; the thorns should never be plucked from his roses.

Ellen Key

Whereas nationalism still seeks power, honour, and glory through means that endanger other countries, patriotism knows that a country's strength and honour can only be permanently safeguarded through concourse with other countries. And whereas nationalism scoffs at the idea of international laws and regulations, patriotism seeks to create such.

Ellen Key

The emancipation of women is practically the greatest egoistic movement of the nineteenth century, and the most intense affirmation of the right of the self that history has yet seen.

Ellen Key

Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.

Ellen Key

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

Children must be impressed with the fact that the greatest heroes are those who fight to help others, not those who fight for power or glory. They must be made to understand that victory does not prove that the thing fought for is right, nor that defeat proves that a cause is wrong.

Ellen Key

Everything, everything in war is barbaric... But the worst barbarity of war is that it forces men collectively to commit acts against which individually they would revolt with their whole being.

Ellen Key

While the women of the older generation were thankful if only they succeeded in obtaining 'a work and a duty,' however monotonous and wearing it might be, the will of the younger generation for a pleasurable labour has fortunately increased.

Ellen Key

The serious questions that are talked out or strangled with red tape are more numerous than those that are killed by silence; the number of people whose ideas are knocked on the head in societies is greater in our day than that of the solitary fighters who go under.

Ellen Key

The belief that we some day shall be able to prevent war is, to me, one with the belief in the possibility of making humanity really human.

Ellen Key

When, in any ethical department, unity is attained between outer demands and inner desires, between nature and conscience, between the needs of society and the individual, the moral formula is void because inner necessity then makes it psychically and physically impossible to break the outer law. Thus, true morality is attained.

Ellen Key

For thousands of years, poetry has been picturing love as a mysterious and tragic power. But when anyone says the same thing in plain prose, and adds that life would be colourless and poor without the great passions, then this is called immorality!

Ellen Key

No one who passively endures an injustice against himself has the material in him to struggle for the rights of others. The one who patiently forbears becomes an accessory to the injustice done to others. He who resists the injustice which he himself meets can open up the way to a higher right for others.

Ellen Key

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

When the crying child is immediately isolated, and it is explained to him at the same time that whoever annoys others must not be with them, if this isolation is the absolute result and cannot be avoided, in the child's mind a basis is laid for the experience that one must be alone when one makes oneself unpleasant or disagreeable.

Ellen Key