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Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes | Quotes said by Mary Wollstonecraft

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #1

    [I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.


  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #2

    Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #3

    England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #4

    How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #5

    I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #6

    I do not wish them [women] to have power over men; but over themselves.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #7

    I earnestly wish to point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists. I wish to persuade women to endeavor to acquire strength, both of mind and body, and to convince them that the soft phrases, susceptibility of heart, delicacy of sentiment, and refinement of taste, are almost synonymous with epithets of weakness, and that those beings are only the objects of pity, and that kind of love which has been termed its sister, will soon become objects of contempt.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #8

    I love man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #9

    I never wanted but your heart--that gone, you have nothing more to give.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #10

    If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #11

    Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #12

    It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity - and make them, as a part of the human species, labour by reforming themselves to reform the world. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #13

    It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #14

    Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #15

    Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #16

    Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher’s stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #17

    Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #18

    My dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed - my dearest pleasure when free.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #19

    My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #20

    No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #21

    Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #22

    Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #23

    Taught from their infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #24

    The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #25

    The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #26

    Virtue can only flourish among equals.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #27

    What but a pestilential vapour can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies?

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #28

    Women are degraded by the propensity to enjoy the present moment, and, at last, despise the freedom which they have not sufficient virtue to struggle to attain.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #29

    Women are systematically degraded by receiving the trivial attentions which men think it manly to pay to the sex, when, in fact, men are insultingly supporting their own superiority.

  • Mary Wollstonecraft Quote #30

    Women are told from their infancy, and taught by the example of their mothers, that a little knowlegde of human weakness, justly termed cunning, softness of temper; outward obedience, and a scrupulous attention to a puerile kind of proptiety, will obtain for them the protection of man; and should they be beautiful, every thing else is needless, for, at least, twenty years of their lives.

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