All philanthropy... is only a savory fumigation burning at the mouth of a sewer. This incense offering makes the air more endurable to passers-by, but it does not hinder the infection in the sewer from spreading.
– 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
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
I can't tell you how many shows I've done with full-blown migraine headaches.
– Ellen Key
Love is moral even without legal marriage, but marriage is immoral without love.
– Ellen Key
Not observation of a duty but liberty itself is the pledge that assures fidelity.
– Ellen Key
The educator must above all understand how to wait; to reckon all effects in the light of the future, not of the present.
– 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
The more horrifying this world becomes, the more art becomes abstract.
– Ellen Key
When one paints an ideal, one does not need to limit one's imagination.
– 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.