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

How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
Mary Wollstonecraft

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

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

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

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.
Mary Wollstonecraft

In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.
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 appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust.
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

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

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

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

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

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
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

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

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