“Out of the frying pan into the fire! What is marriage but prostitution to one man instead of many? No different!”

Introductio ad prudentiam: Part II (1727), Gnomologia (1732)

Source: Don Quixote de la Mancha (1605–1615), Part I, Book III, Ch. 4.

"Menippus, a Necromantic Experiment", sect. 4; vol. 1, p. 158.

Part II, chapter 5.
Proverbs (1546), Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)

"Marianne".
Songs

Source: Alcatraz Versus the Scrivener's Bones

Ch VIII: The World As It Could Be Made, p. 129-130
1910s, Proposed Roads To Freedom (1918)
Context: One of the most horrible things about commercialism is the way in which it poisons the relations of men and women. The evils of prostitution are generally recognized, but, great as they are, the effect of economic conditions on marriage seems to me even worse. There is not infrequently, in marriage, a suggestion of purchase, of acquiring a woman on condition of keeping her in a certain standard of material comfort. Often and often, a marriage hardly differs from prostitution except by being harder to escape from. The whole basis of these evils is economic. Economic causes make marriage a matter of bargain and contract, in which affection is quite secondary, and its absence constitutes no recognized reason for liberation. Marriage should be a free, spontaneous meeting of mutual instinct, filled with happiness not unmixed with a feeling akin to awe: it should involve that degree of respect of each for the other that makes even the most trifling interference with liberty an utter impossibility, and a common life enforced by one against the will of the other an unthinkable thing of deep horror.

Canto XIII, stanza 30 (tr. W. S. Rose)
Orlando Furioso (1532)