Quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft

“Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices...rather than to root them out.”

“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.”

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

“The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on.”

“Life cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator.”

“Love from its very nature must be transitory. To seek for a secret that would render it constant would be as wild a search as for the philosopher's stone or the grand panacea: and the discovery would be equally useless, or rather pernicious to mankind. The most holy band of society is friendship.”

“The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.”

“[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.”

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

“When poverty is more disgraceful than even vice, is not morality cut to the quick?”

“People thinking for themselves have more energy in their voice, than any government, which it is possible for human wisdom to invent; and every government not aware of this sacred truth will, at some period, be suddenly overturned.”

“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.”