Ellen Key Quotes

The human imagination has already come to conceive the possibility of recreating human society.

Since it is one of the great attributes of our species to be susceptible of improvement and capable of experiencing the most beneficial changes, for this reason what are vulgarly called 'venerable establishments' will often range themselves in opposition to the best interests of the community.

Alfred Nobel believed that social changes are brought about slowly, and sometimes by indirect means.

The typical journalist's typical lead for the typical Canadian story nowadays is along this line: that Canadians are hard at work trying to gain a reputation as a nation of rapid social change.

You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.

… societies are kept stable and healthy by reform, not by thought police

Governments never lead; they follow progress

I want a real revolution, a real change in society: society, a great organic mass of well-regulated forces used for the bringing-about a happy life for all.

Changing the world is not easy.

Using political tools to change social conditions won't work.

The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.

The world is very different today than it was in 1968.

The only hope of socialism resides in those who have already brought about in themselves, as far as is possible in the society of today, that union between manual and intellectual labor which characterizes the society we are aiming at.

Men start revolutionary changes for reasons connected with their private lives.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

Man is as the Lord made him. But we can change our institutions.

Law cannot stand apart from the social changes around it.

I want to be known as a catalyst for change.

It is an easy and vulgar thing to please the mob ... but to improve them is a work fraught with difficulty.

Courts should ... follow, rather than lead, changes taking place elsewhere in society.

[T]he great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment.

Reform is born of need, not pity. No vital movement of the people has worked down, for good or evil; fermented, instead, it carried up the heaving, cloggy mass.

No community ever did or ever can emerge unassisted by external helps from a state of utter barbarism into anything that can be called civilization

To build socialism means not only building gigantic factories and flour mills. This is essential but not enough for building socialism. People must grow in mind and heart.

No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.