Robert Briffault Quotes

In the past decade or so, the women's magazines have taken to running home-handyperson articles suggesting that women can learn to fix things just as well as men. These articles are apparently based on the ludicrous assumption that _men_ know how to fix things, when in fact all they know how to do is _look_ at things in a certain squinty-eyed manner, which they learned in Wood Shop; eventually, when enough things in the home are broken, they take a job requiring them to transfer to another home.

Absolutism is a guarantee of objectionable morals in the same way that absolutism in government is a guarantee of objectionable government.

The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.

The effects of infantile instruction are, like those of syphilis, never completely cured.

The hell of human suffering, evil and oppression is paved with good intentions. The men who have most injured and oppressed humanity, who have most deeply sinned against it, were according to their standards and their conscience good men; what was bad in them, what wrought moral evil and cruelty, treason to truth and progress, was not at all in their intentions, in their purpose, in their personal character, but in their opinions.

The full-grown modern human being ... is conscious of touching the highest pinnacle of fulfillment ... when he is consumed in the service of an idea, in the conquest of the goal pursued.

The Renaissance of Europe did not take place in the 15th century. Rather it began when Europe learned from the culture of the Arabs. The cradle of European awakening is not Italy. It is the Muslim Spain.

For a male and female to live continuously together is biologically speaking, an extremely unnatural condition.