Charles Fourier Quotes

The extension of women's rights is the basic principle of all social progress.

Civilization is a social plague on the planet, and vices are just as necessary to it as is a virus to disease.

Any civilized administration, however organized, prefers its own good to that of the people ...

The Civilized ... murder their children by producing too many of them without being able to provide for their well-being. Morality or theories of false virtue stimulate them to manufacture cannon fodder, anthills of conscripts who are forced to sell themselves out of poverty. This improvident paternity is a false virtue, the selfishness of pleasure.

Despots prefer the friendship of the dog, who, unjustly mistreated and debased, still loves and serves the man who wronged him.

Hosts of merchants encumber the cities, and the streets are cluttered with solicitors who swarm without limit or purpose.

Attractions are proportional to destinies.

the family is a group that needs to escape from itself...

Under civilization poverty is born of superabundance itself.

Love in the Phalanstery is no longer, as it is with us, a recreation which detracts from work; on the contrary it is the soul and the vehicle, the mainspring, of all works and of the whole of universal attraction.

Once upon a time people talked about the infallibility of the pope; today it is that of the merchant which they wish to establish.

The philosophers say that the passions are too lively, too fiery; in truth they are weak and languid. All around one sees the mass of men endure the persecution of a few masters and the despotism of prejudices without offering the slightest resistance... their passions are too weak to permit them to derive audacity from despair.

It is known that the best nations have always been those which concede the greatest amount of liberty to women.

Certainly in each social period, youth must be made to venerate the dominant absurdities.

To confound the tyranny of man there should exist for a century a third sex, both male and female, and stronger than men. This new sex would prove with the lash that men as well as women are made for its pleasure; and then you would hear men protesting against the tyranny of the hermaphrodite sex and admitting that strength should not be the sole rule of right. Just why do they refuse to grant the women the independence which they would demand from the third sex?

It is easy to compress the passions by violence. Philosophy suppresses them with a stroke of the pen. Locks and the sword come to the aid of sweet morality, but nature appeals these judgments; she regains her rights in secret. Passion stifled at one point reappears at another like water held back by a dike; it is driven inward like the fluid of an ulcer closed to soon.

Philosophy was right to vaunt liberty; it is the foremost desire of all creatures. But philosophy forgot that in civilized societies liberty is illusory if the common people lack wealth. When the wage-earning classes are poor, their independence is as fragile as a house without foundations. The free man who lacks wealth immediately sinks back under the yoke of the rich. The newly freed slave takes fright at the need of providing for his own subsistence and hastens to sell himself back into slavery in order to escape this new anxiety that hangs over him like Damocles' sword. In thoughtlessly giving him liberty without wealth, you merely replace his physical torment with a mental torment. He finds life burdensome in his new state... Thus when you give liberty to the people, it must be bolstered by two supports which are the guarantee of comfort and industrial attraction...

The peoples of civilization see their wretchedness increase in direct proportion to the advance of industry.

Who is wiser: the man who plants flowers along life's way or the man who makes it bristle with thorns?

One could judge the degree of civilization of a country by the social and political position of its women