1) "Since the happiness and progress of man depend so much on his own behavior, since he is able to control his behavior under the influence of his ideas, and since his behavior remains so bad, it would appear that his ideas are largely wrong." page 4

      2) "If a religion is based on fact, and urges conduct in line with the natural laws of social evolution, it is the greatest help in our development. If it rests on false assumptions, forces into the mind illogical and contradictory deductions, and urges conduct which interferes with right progress, or which is quite useless, its tremendous power keeps us down instead of lifting us up." page 5

      3) "What would have been the effect upon religion if it had come to us through the minds of women?

      If we are to trace our engrossing interest in death to the constant fighting and killing of early man, to the fact that death was the crisis in his activities, the significant event, rousing him to thought, what other interest are we to look for in the life of woman? What crisis set her mind at work, and what would have been its influence on religion?

      The business of primitive woman was to work and to bear children. Her work was regular and repetitive; save for the gradual budding of invention and blossoming of decoration, it had no climax. There was small excitement in this, no thrilling event.

      Yet her life held one crisis more impressive, more arousing, far, than man's; her glory was in giving life, not taking it. To her the miracle, the stimulus to thought, was birth.

      Had the religions of the world developed through her mind, they w9ould have shown one deep, essential difference, the difference between birth and death. The man was interested in one end of life, she in the other. He was moved to faith, fear, and hope for the future; she to love and labor in the present.

      To the death-based religion the main question is, "What is going to happen to me after I am dead?" - a posthumous question.

      To the birth-based religion the main question is, "What must be done for the child who is born? - an immediate altruism.

      Women were not given to bootless speculation as to where the new soul came from, because of the instant exigencies of its presence. It had come, indeed, but in a small and feeble state, utterly dependent on her love and service. With birth as the major crisis of life, awakening thought leads inevitably to that love and service, to defense and care and teaching, to all the labors that maintain and improve life." pages 45 - 46

      4) "Birth-based religion would steadily hold before our eyes the vision of a splendid race, the duty of upbuilding it. It would tell no story of old sins, of anguish and despair, of passionate pleading for forgivness for the mischief we have made, but would offer always the sunrise of a fresh hope: "Here is a new baby. Begin again!" "page 50

      5) "Now that they have in large measure reached their goal of "equality with men," - not real equality in social development but equality in immediate conditions , - it is sickening to see so many of the newly freed using their freedom in mere imitation of masculine vices." page 54

      6) "In the whole range of sub-human life we see that her desire for the male is transient, and that the processes of motherhood are her main distinctions." pages 69 - 70

      7) "It would seem possible to convince even a child of ten that it was silly to do a thing merely because one's remote ancestors did it, and that a person persisting in unreasonable conduct resembles and idiot. Children are rational if rationally treated, sometimes even if not. It is the lack of reason among those who teach them which is responsible for the persistence of primeval habits. When grown persons continue to allow the "morals" of antiquity to slide down the generations through their own conduct, we can hardly expect them to teach reason and self-control to their children.

      Best proof of the absence of intelligence and the powerlessness of religion in "morals" is in our common limitations and applications of the word. Am "immoral" man or woman, in common parlance, is one who does not conform to our standards in the sex relation. These standards antedate both law and religion, as is shown in the masculine "moral" by which a husband may slay his wife's lover. This "unwritten law" overrides both the laws he has written against murder and the religious commandment "Thou shalt not kill." " pages 122 - 123

      8) "Jesus was far more gentle with the Magdalene, and with the woman taken in adultery, than he was with the scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites he so condemned." page 130

      9) "Our conscious progress depends on a growing ability to distinguish ethical values in the widening range of social relationship; and this ability is not cultivated at home, at school or in church." page 144

      10) "Punishment is quite a different thing from consequences." page 145

      11) "All ethical values are based on social relations; society confers the "right" and society must defend it. But in our ethicless behavior, carrying a sub-human egotism on into human relations, we have let our "right" to private property swell into the "wrong" of private ownership of public property, setting no limit to possession. The class warfare of our troubled times makes a similar mistake, ignoring the social claim and setting up those of a "class," of certain grades of labor. The profiteer and the speculator rob society, and so do the slacker and the committer of sabotage. Stealing was wrong long before any commandment was written. It is forbidden because it is wrong, not wrong because it is forbidden." page 148 - 149

      12) "To poison one man's food is wrong. To poison the food of the public is more wrong. To weaken and poison the public mind is worse, far worse." page 149

      13) Regarding the sex act: "A clean, natural function being perverted and debased, failure to exercise it was then called "holy." " page 181

      14) "Every great religious teacher has rebelled against the gathered crust of irrelevant habit, and taught new truth, none more sincerely and powerfully than Jesus; but always the church, though founded on the new truth, has gone on under the influence of the law of inertia, developing a complicated mass of practices quite unrelated to that truth." page 187

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