When any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation. Mary Wollstonecraft More Quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft More Quotes From Mary Wollstonecraft I must be allowed to add some explanatory remarks to bring the subject home to reason-to that sluggish reason, which supinely takes opinions on trust, and obstinately supports them to spare itself the labour of thinking. Mary Wollstonecraft support home thinking 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. Mary Wollstonecraft strength men sex Women all want to be ladies, which is simply to have nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what. Mary Wollstonecraft care want How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions? Mary Wollstonecraft rational exertion literature When poverty is more disgraceful than even vice, is not morality cut to the quick? Mary Wollstonecraft poverty cutting vices 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 courage character men 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 afterlife husband kings A slavish bondage to parents cramps every faculty of the mind Mary Wollstonecraft bondage parent mind When a man seduces a woman, it should, I think, be termed a left-handed marriage. Mary Wollstonecraft marriage men thinking And this homage to women's attractions has distorted their understanding tosuch an extent that almost all the civilized women of the present century are anxious only to inspire love, when they ought to have the nobler aim of getting respect for their abilities and virtues. Mary Wollstonecraft understanding love inspire 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 church dark men ... the whole tenour of female education ... tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean. Mary Wollstonecraft education romantic mean 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. Mary Wollstonecraft liberty war art 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 progress mind long Thinking it selfish to dwell on her own sufferings, when in the midst of wretches, who had not only lost all that endears life, but their very selves, her imagination was occupied with melancholy earnestness to trace the mazes of misery, through which so many wretches must have passed to this gloomy receptacle of disjointed souls, to the grand source of human corruption. Mary Wollstonecraft selfish imagination thinking How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proven unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind. Mary Wollstonecraft broken taken world I am an unfortunate and deserted creature, I look around and I have no relation or friend upon earth. These amiable people to whom I go have never seen me and know little of me. I am full of fears, for if I fail there, I am an outcast in the world forever. Mary Wollstonecraft forever people looks Some years ago, when the images which this world affords first opened upon me, when I felt the cheering warmth of summer and heard the rustling of the leaves and the warbling of the birds, and these were all to me, I should have wept to die; now it is my only consolation. Polluted by crimes and torn by the bitterest remorse, where can I find rest but in death? Mary Wollstonecraft cheer should-have summer Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world. Mary Wollstonecraft diversity struggle justice The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless. Mary Wollstonecraft diversity alive justice
