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... the happiness of a people is the only rational object of government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all.

Frances Wright

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Frances Wright
Age: 57 †
Born: 1795
Born: September 6
Died: 1852
Died: December 13
Philosopher
Writer
City of Dundee
Frances D'Arusmont
People
Rational
Object
Objects
Choose
Happiness
Free
Government

More quotes by Frances Wright

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The sciences have ever been the surest guides to virtue.
Frances Wright
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Credulity is always a ridiculous, often a dangerous failing: it has made of many a clever man, a fool and of many a good man, a knave.
Frances Wright
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No man can see his own prejudices.
Frances Wright
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Instead of establishing facts, we have to overthrow errors instead of ascertaining what is, we have to chase from our imaginations what is not.
Frances Wright
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It is singular to look round upon a country where the dreams of sages, smiled at as utopian, seem distinctly realized, a people voluntarily submitting to laws of their own imposing, with arms in their hands respecting the voice of a government which their breath created and which their breath could in a moment destroy!
Frances Wright
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We have ... dreamed so much and observed so little, that our imaginations have grown larger than the world we live in, and our judgments have dwindled down to a point.
Frances Wright
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It has already been observed that women, wherever placed, however high or low in the scale of cultivation, hold the destinies of human kind. Men will ever rise or fall to the level of the other sex.
Frances Wright
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It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance. Let women stand where they may in the scale of improvement, their position decides that of the race.
Frances Wright
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Equality is the soul of liberty there is, in fact, no liberty without it.
Frances Wright
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Fathers and husbands! do ye not also understand this fact? Do ye not see how, in the mental bondage of your wives and fair companions, ye yourselves are bound?
Frances Wright
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Pets, like their owners, tend to expand a little over the Christmas period.
Frances Wright
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He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles.
Frances Wright
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... your spiritual teachers caution you against enquiry--tell you not to read certain books not to listen to certain people to beware of profane learning to submit your reason, and to receive their doctrines for truths. Such advice renders them suspicious counsellors.
Frances Wright
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It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential.
Frances Wright
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The knowledge of one generation is the ignorance of the next.
Frances Wright
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What were the glories of the sun, if we knew not the gloom of darkness?
Frances Wright
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Truth is but approved facts.
Frances Wright
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... so far from entrenching human conduct within the gentle barriers of peace and love, religion has ever been, and now is, the deepest source of contentions, wars, persecutions for conscience sake, angry words, angry feelings, backbitings, slanders, suspicions, false judgments, evil interpretations, unwise, unjust, injurious, inconsistent actions.
Frances Wright
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the mode of delivering a truth makes, for the most part, as much impression on the mind of the listener as the truth itself.
Frances Wright
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Love of power more frequently originates in vanity than pride (two qualities, by the way, which are often confounded) and is, consequently, yet more peculiarly the sin of little than of great minds.
Frances Wright