Quotes by 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?

Taught from infancy that beauty is womans sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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.

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

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.

“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.”