Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes

It is time to effect a revolution in female manners - time to restore to them their lost dignity. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

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.

Women have seldom sufficient employment to silence their feelings; a round of little cares, or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense.

Virtue can only flourish among equals.

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This quote implies that true virtue or moral excellence is most likely to thrive within an environment of equality, where individuals are treated fairly and justly. It reflects on the connection between virtue and equitable treatment among individuals.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mi... -Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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.

Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.

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

In every age there has been a stream of popular opinion that has carried all before it, and given a family character, as it were, to the century.

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.

If the abstract rights of man will bear discussion and explanation, those of women, by a parity of reasoning, will not shrink from the same test.

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

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.

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?

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

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 Quotes

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