Quotes from Charles Fourier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The method of doubt must be applied to civilization; we must doubt its necessity, its excellence, and its permanence.

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

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.

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

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

Social progress and changes of historical period take place in proportion to the advance of women toward liberty, and social decline occurs as a result of the diminution of the liberty of women.

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.

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.

To speak frankly, the family bond in the civilized regime causes fathers to desire the death of their children and children to desire the death of their fathers.

Wisdom, virtue, morality, all these have fallen out of fashion: everybody worships at the shrine of commerce.

The French are the greatest cuckolds to be found in the world. There is unquestionably less cuckoldry in Germany.

Ignorant as regards the unity of man with himself, the world is still more ignorant in respect to the two other unities - unity of man with God and the universe.

When we see civilization elated with this declining and decrepit phase of its career, we are reminded of a faded belle who, boasting of her attractions in her fiftieth year, excites at once the remark that she was fairer at twenty-five. So it is with civilization, which, dreaming of perfection and progress, is constantly deteriorating, and which will find but too soon in its industrial achievements new sources of political oppression, crimes and commotions.

...commerce, which is mistakenly classified among the productive forms of work, ought to be ranked first among the parasitical professions like those of monk, soldier, lawyer etc.

Attractions are proportional to destinies.