Shaw as quoted in Tristan Taormino’s Opening Up: A Guide to Creating and Sustaining Open Relationships (which I’m currently enjoying reading):
Those who talk most about the blessings of marriage and the constancy of its vows are the very people who declare that if the chain were broken and the prisoners left free to choose, the whole social fabric would fly asunder. You cannot have the argument both ways. If the prisoner is happy, why lock him in? If he is not, why pretend that he is?
Anyway . . .
I thought I’d just post this and add interesting quotes on this topic (that being things that reflect and/or have informed my opinions of the institution of marriage) as I find them. I’ll probably do this with more topics too, since I seem to have difficulty coming up with my own words about anything and so I need to steal those of others.
Love, the strongest and deepest element in all life, the harbinger of hope, of joy, of ecstasy; love, the defier of all laws, of all conventions; love, the freest, the most powerful molder of human destiny; how can such an all-compelling force be synonymous with that poor little State- and Church-begotten weed, marriage?
EMMA GOLDMAN, Anarchism and Other Essays
Hooray for Darwin!
(OK - Wallace too)