Mary Wollstonecraft Quotes

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

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

...a being, with a capacity of reasoning, would not have failed to discover, as his faculties unfolded, that true happiness arose from the friendship and intimacy which can only be enjoyed by equals; and that charity is not a condescending distribution of alms, but an intercourse of good offices and mutual benefits, founded on respect for justice and humanity.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

[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

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

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

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

Few, I believe, have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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

Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him the gift of reason?In this style, argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason; yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

I aim at being useful, and sincerity will render me unaffected; for, wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.—I shall be employed about things, not words!

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Gracious Creator of the whole human race! hast thou created such a being as woman, who can trace thy wisdom in thy works, and feel that thou alone art by thy nature, exalted above her-for no better purpose? Can she believe that she was only made to submit to man her equal; a being, who, like her, was sent into the world to acquire virtue? Can she consent to be occupied merely to please him; merely to adorn the earth, when her soul is capable of rising to thee? And can she rest supinely dependent on man for reason, when she ought to mount with him the arduous steeps of knowledge?

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

The little respect paid to chastity in the male world is, I am persuaded, the grand source of many of the physical and moral evils that torment mankind, as well as of the vices and follies that degrade and destroy women; yet, at school, boys infallibly lose that decent bashfulness, which might have ripened into modesty at home.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Let us eat, drink, and love for tomorrow we die, would be in fact the language of reason, the morality of life; and who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow?

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wishes the force of passions.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

But the days of true heroism are over, when a citizen fought for his country like a Fabricius or a Washington, and then returned to his farm to let his virtuous fervour run in a more placid, but not less salutary, stream.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Virtue can only flourish among equals.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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

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

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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

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.

~ Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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