Quotes from Mary Wollstonecraft

Women do not want power over men, they want power over themselves.

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

Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.

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.

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.

Some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will always govern.

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?

In this metropolis a number of lurking leeches infamously gain subsistence by practicing on the credulity of women.

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

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.

A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

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.

Virtue can only flourish among equals.

The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.

It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.

I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.

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.

Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.

Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.

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.

It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weakness.

Virtue can only flourish among equals.