Quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft

About Mary Wollstonecraft:

Mary Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational beings and imagines a social order founded on reason.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.

Mary Wollstonecraft

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

Mary Wollstonecraft

Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave?

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 ob...

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

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

Mary Wollstonecraft

But let me now stop; I may be a little partial, and view every thing with the jaundiced eye of melancholy - for I am sad - and have cause.

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

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

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

Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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

Mary Wollstonecraft

Virtue can only flourish among equals.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.

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

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

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

Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.

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

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.

Mary Wollstonecraft

Author Bio

  • NameMary Wollstonecraft
  • DescriptionBritish writer and philosopher
  • BornApril 27, 1759
  • DiedSeptember 10, 1797
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionWriter; Translator; Philosopher; Historian; Novelist; Essayist