A people who have put up with the Oldenborgs for four hundred years and made loyalty to them into a virtue!
They do not even understand that here there is no Antichrist but Common Sense.
Abandoned by all, except Unhappiness and me.
When did God become Man? When Nature reached the point in its development at which the first man made his appearance; when Nature became man, then God did.
Women say of the beloved one: "A bouquet he brings smells better than one another brings."
You are weak, dear one, God help you! And you help! and I help!
These thoughts have wrought a man of me, have finally wrought me to a man.
I procured all that was accessible to me in modern French and English literature on the woman subject.
In the year 1869 my thoughts on the subordinate position of women in society began to assume shape, and I attempted a connected record of them. I adopted as my starting point Sören Kierkegaard's altogether antiquated conception of woman and contested it at every point. But all that I had planned and drawn up was cast aside when in 1869 John Stuart Mill's book on the subject fell into my hands. I felt Mill's superiority to be so immense and regarded his book as so epoch-making that I necessarily had to reject my own draft and restrict myself to the translation and introduction of what he had said. In November, 1869, I published Mill's book in Danish and in this manner introduced the modern woman's movement into Denmark.
The translation was of this advantage to me that it brought me first into epistolary communication, and later into personal contact with one of the greatest men of the time.