Charlotte Perkins Gilman Quotes

Those interested in perpetuating present conditions are always in tears about the marvelous past that is about to disappear, without having so much as a smile for the young future.

My hunch is that pop culture began to stagnate the moment Americans started to love the past more than they did the future.

I'm not sure I want to preserve the old ways just for the sake of saying, 'I don't believe in change.'

Change is not what we expect from religious people. They tend to love the past more than the present or the future.

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

There is much that is incomprehensible to the Englishman who comes among us taking notes, and not the least is that no one wants his cut-and-dried schemes of reforming what we do not wish to reform.

The fact is the human race is not only slow about borrowing valuable ideas--it sometimes persists in not borrowing them at all.

The idea of the sacred is quite simply one of the most conservative notions in any culture, because it seeks to turn other ideas — uncertainty, progress, change — into crimes.

Inertia is as powerful a force in society and politics as it is on physics, and effecting change can be demanding and discouraging.

The Chinese move very slowly. Our customs are so fixed that it takes much time to change them.

Distance is collapsing in our world. People all over the world are having difficulty imagining their future, and their governments just tell them about the virtues of the past.

The world changes fast, and a lot of the old country folks have a hard time keeping up with it, and it makes them sad.

Things have changed so much. People walked away from a simple life we had in the '20s and '30s, and I am glad that I am able to touch that period in our lives with the shows that I do and with the music that I do.

I'm not a technophobe, but I'm pretty old fashioned.

I never thought I wanted to write about the '50s, because I thought it was the most boring and bland decade to grow up in, and I never wanted to go back there.

Nearly all great civilizations that perished did so because they had crystallized, because they were incapable of adapting themselves to new conditions, new methods, new points of view. It is as though people would rather die than change.

The moral code which was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for our children.

The fact that women in the home have shut themselves away from the thought and life of the world has done much to retard progress.We fill the world with the children of 20th century A.D. fathers and 20th century B.C. mothers.

The conservative may clamor against reform, but he might as well clamor against the centrifugal force. He sighs for the "good old times,"--he might as well wish the oak back into the acorn.

My father read Charles Dickens to us as children, and at the end of virtually every novel he would choke up and start to cry - and my father NEVER cried. It always made me love him all the more.

Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it-have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.

The triangle of truisms, of father, mother and child, cannot be destroyed; it can only destroy those civilizations which disregard it.

The price of liberty is something more than eternal vigilance. There must also be eternal advance. We can save the rights we have inherited from our fathers only by winning new ones to bequeath our children.

It's immoral to parent irresponsibly... And it doesn't help matters any when prime time tv, like "Murphy Brown", a character who is supposed to represent a successful career woman of today, mocks the importance of the father by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another "lifestyle choice." Marriage is probably the best anti-poverty program there is... Even though our cultural leaders in Hollywood, network TV, the national newspapers routinely jeer at [such values] I think most of us in this room know that some things are good, and other things are wrong.

At every crossway on the path that leads to the future, each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand men appointed to guard the past. Let us have no fear that the fair towers of former days be sufficiently defended. The least that the most timid among us can do is not to add to the immense dead weight that nature drags along.