At the present day the crude theory of the sexual impulse held on one side, and the ignorant rejection of theory altogether on the other side, are beginning to be seen as both alike unjustified.
Birth-control is effecting, and promising to effect, many functions in our social life.
But when we have regard to the actual facts of life, we can no longer place virtue in a vacuum.
Education, whatever else it should or should not be, must be an inoculation against the poisons of life and an adequate equipment in knowledge and skill for meeting the chances of life.
Every man of genius sees the world at a different angle from his fellows, and there is his tragedy.
Failing to find in women exactly the same kind of sexual emotions, as they find in themselves, men have concluded that there are none there at all.
Few people realise - few indeed have the knowledge or the opportunity to realise - how much women thus lose, alike in the means to fulfill their own lives and in the power to help others.
For every fresh stage in our lives we need a fresh education, and there is no stage for which so little educational preparation is made as that which follows the reproductive period.
In philosophy, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met along the way.
In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.
In the first place we are justified in believing that in the future home men will no longer be so helpless, so domestically parasitic, as in the past.
It is becoming clear that the old platitudes can no longer be maintained, and that if we wish to improve our morals we must first improve our knowledge.
It is more passion and ever more that we need if we are to undo the work of Hate, if we are to add to the gaiety and splendour of life, to the sum of human achievement, to the aspiration of human ecstasy.
It is on our failures that we base a new and different and better success.
It was taken for granted at that time that the female had both the right to her own body, and the right to a certain amount of enjoyment in the use of it.
Lovers in their play - when they have been liberated from the traditions which bound them to the trivial or the gross conception of play in love - are thus moving amongst the highest human activities, alike of the body and of the soul.
Mankind is becoming a single unit, and that for a unit to fight against itself is suicide.
Monogamy and the home, it was claimed, alike existed for the benefit and protection of women.
No act can be quite so intimate as the sexual embrace.
Of woman as a real human being, with sexual needs and sexual responsibilities, morality has often known nothing.
Socialism also brings us up against the hard rock of eugenic fact which, if we neglect it, will dash our most beautiful social construction to fragments.
Still, whether we like it or not, the task of speeding up the decrease of the human population becomes increasingly urgent.
The average husband enjoys the total effect of his home but is usually unable to contribute any of the details of work and organisation that make it enjoyable.
The by-product is sometimes more valuable than the product.
The erotic idea, in its deeper sense, that is to say the element of love, arose very slowly in mankind.
The family has been regarded as a small State of which the husband and father is head.
The human organism, as we know, is a machine on which excitations from without, streaming through the nerves and brain, effect internal work, and, notably, stimulate the glandular system.
The husband - by primitive instinct partly, certainly by ancient tradition - regards himself as the active partner in matters of love and his own pleasure as legitimately the prime motive for activity.
The more rapidly a civilization progresses, the sooner it dies for another to rise in its place.
The old notion that any strict attempt to adhere to sexual abstinence is beset by terrible risks, insanity and so forth, has no foundation, at all events where we are concerned with reasonably sound and healthy people.
The old-world method of treating children, we know, has long ago been displaced as containing an element of harsh tyranny.
The parents have not only to train their children: it is of at least equal importance that they should train themselves.
The place where optimism flourishes most is the lunatic asylum.
The practices and the ideals of this established morality were both due to men, and both were so thoroughly fashioned that they subjugated alike the actions and the feelings of women.
The primary end of marriage is to beget and bear offspring, and to rear them until they are able to take care of themselves.
The relation of the individual person to the species he belongs to is the most intimate of all relations.
The result was that, directly and indirectly, the legal, economic, and erotic rights of women were all diminished.
The sanitary and mechanical age we are now entering makes up for the mercy it grants to our sense of smell by the ferocity with which it assails our sense of hearing.
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands.
The things that fill men and women with beauty and exhilaration, and spur them to actions beyond themselves, are the things that are now needed.
There is a very intimate connection between hypnotic phenomena and religion.
There is nothing that war has ever achieved we could not better achieve without it.
This means that sex gradually becomes intertwined with all the highest and subtlest human emotions and activities, with the refinements of social intercourse, with high adventure in every sphere, with art, with religion.
Thus, to sum up, we may say that the sexual energy of the organism is a mighty force, automatically generated throughout life.
What we call progress is the exchange of one nuisance for another nuisance.
When love is suppressed hate takes its place.
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