Open the newspapers!--hardly a line that is not a lie.
And poets and speakers flatter a people like that.
Christianity and Humanity have long wished for divorce. Now this is an
accomplished fact.
And the priests are honoured. They plume themselves on not having
certain vices, for which they are too weak.
I know that I shall be stoned, that every boy has his balderdash ready
against that to which the reflection of years and sleepless nights has
given birth. But do you think I am afraid of anyone?
Stupidity was always the bodyguard of Lies.
A people who have put up with the Oldenborgs for four hundred years and
made loyalty to them into a virtue!
They do not even understand that here there is no Antichrist but Common
Sense.
Abandoned by all, except Unhappiness and me.
When did God become Man? When Nature reached the point in its
development at which the first man made his appearance; when Nature
became man, then God did.
Women say of the beloved one: "A bouquet he brings smells better than
one another brings."
You are weak, dear one, God help you! And you help! and I help!
These thoughts have wrought a man of me, have finally wrought me to a
man.
I procured all that was accessible to me in modern French and English
literature on the woman subject.
In the year 1869 my thoughts on the subordinate position of women in
society began to assume shape, and I attempted a connected record of
them. I adopted as my starting point Sören Kierkegaard's altogether
antiquated conception of woman and contested it at every point. But all
that I had planned and drawn up was cast aside when in 1869 John Stuart
Mill's book on the subject fell into my hands. I felt Mill's
superiority to be so immense and regarded his book as so epoch-making
that I necessarily had to reject my own draft and restrict myself to
the translation and introduction of what he had said. In November,
1869, I published Mill's book in Danish and in this manner introduced
the modern woman's movement into Denmark.
The translation was of this advantage to me that it brought me first
into epistolary communication, and later into personal contact with one
of the greatest men of the time.