What but a pestilential vapour can hover over society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies?
It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.
I love 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.
[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.
Taught from their 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.
Let their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.
Few, I believe, have had much affection for mankind, who did not first love their parents, their brothers, sisters, and even the domestic brutes, whom they first played with.
Nature in everything demands respect, and those who violate her laws seldom violate them with impunity.
England and America owe their liberty to commerce, which created a new species of power to undermine the feudal system. But let them beware of the consequences: the tyranny of wealth is still more galling and debasing than that of rank.
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
I never wanted but your heart–that gone, you have nothing more to give.
The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.
It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world!
Let us eat, drink, and love for tomorrow we die, would be in fact the language of reason, the morality of life; and who but a fool would part with a reality for a fleeting shadow?
Solitude and reflection are necessary to give to wishes the force of passions.
How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
But the days of true heroism are over, when a citizen fought for his country like a Fabricius or a Washington, and then returned to his farm to let his virtuous fervour run in a more placid, but not less salutary, stream.
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.
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.
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.
The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
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.
Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.
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.
Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.
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.
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.
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.
Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.
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 woman’s 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.