[On Harvard President Charles William Eliot's lamentation that the average Harvard graduate had fewer than two children:] That is ...quite enough. Harvard graduates do not always make the best fathers. Why should we be agitated over the too small families of the rich when there are so many children of the poor that are not cared for? The rich should make it their duty to raise up these children to a higher standard.... Men of the world hate to give up their tobacco, liquor, sports, clubs, their luxurious habits, their freedom from responsibility. They prefer to flock together and so women are compelled to do the same. President Eliot talks as though the young women were sitting around anxiously and aimlessly waiting for the graduates to come and get them. He would find, if he should make the proper investigation, that a class of women is being developed who are demanding a higher standard of morals in men than did those of past generations, and if they cannot get husbands who reach this standard they are making very satisfactory careers for themselves outside of marriage.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The aura of the theocratic death penalty for adultery still clings to America, even outside New England, and multiple divorce, whi...ch looks to the European like serial polygamy, is the moral solution to the problem of the itch. Love comes into it too, of course, but in Europe we tend to see marital love as an eternity which encompasses hate and also indifference: when we promise to love we really mean that we promise to honour a contract. Americans, seeming to take marriage with not enough seriousness, are really taking love and sex with too much.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Why don't you go home to your wife? I'll tell you what. I'll go home to your wife and outside of the improvements, you'll never kn...ow the difference. Pull over to the side of the road there and let me see your marriage license.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Like everything which is not the involuntary result of fleeting emotion but the creation of time and will, any marriage, happy or ...unhappy, is infinitely more interesting than any romance, however passionate.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Marriage is a fierce battle before which the two partners ask heaven for its blessing, because loving each other is the most audac...ious of enterprises; the battle is not slow to start, and victory, that is to say freedom, goes to the cleverest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I had reconciled myself to a life without marriage or children for the sake of my career. And then my brothers got married. I real...ized I didn't even have a home, that in the future I couldn't do politics when I had to ask permission from their wives as to whether I could use the dining room or the telephone. I couldn't rent a home because a woman living on her own can be suspected of all kinds of scandalous associations. So keeping in mind that many people in Pakistan looked to me, I decided to make a personal sacrifice in what I thought would be, more or less, a loveless marriage, a marriage of convenience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love and marriage, love and marriage Go together like a horse and carriage... Dad was told by mother You can't have one without the other.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We lov'd, and we lov'd, as long as we could, Till our love was lov'd out in us both;... But our marriage is dead, when the pleasure is fled: 'Twas pleasure first made it an oath.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of a...ll conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful moulder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State and Church-begotten weed, marriage?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »