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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What, but the rapacity of the only men who exercised their reason, the priests, secured such vast property to the church, when a man gave his perishable substance to save himself from the dark torments of purgatory.

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

Author Bio

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