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Fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered.
Harriet Martineau
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Harriet Martineau
Age: 74 †
Born: 1802
Born: June 12
Died: 1876
Died: June 27
Economist
Essayist
Feminist
Historian
Journalist
Linguist
Novelist
Philosopher
Sociologist
Suffragist
Translator
Writer
Norwich
Norfolk
Retiring
Modesty
False
Thus
Conscience
Succumb
Literature
Endangered
Inconsistent
Fidelity
More quotes by Harriet Martineau
Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
Harriet Martineau
This noble word [women], spirit-stirring as it passes over English ears, is in America banished, and 'ladies' and 'females' substituted: the one to English taste mawkish and vulgar the other indistinctive and gross.
Harriet Martineau
Religion is a temper, not a pursuit. It is the moral atmosphere in which human beings are to live and move. Men do not live to breathe: they breathe to live.
Harriet Martineau
As new discoveries are causing all-penetrating physical lights so to abound as that, as has been said, we shall soon not know where in the world to get any darkness, so our new facilities for every sort of communication work to reduce privacy much within its former limits.
Harriet Martineau
. . . is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?
Harriet Martineau
It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.
Harriet Martineau
I saw no poor men, except a few intemperate ones. I saw some very poor women but God and man know that the time has not come for women to make their injuries even heard of.
Harriet Martineau
Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
Harriet Martineau
There are always principles to be depended upon in this matter of taxation ... Amidst the inconsistent, the bewildering representations offered, a certain number must be in accordance with true principles.
Harriet Martineau
influence which is given on the side of money is usually against truth.
Harriet Martineau
Women, like men, must be educated with a view to action, or their studies cannot be called education.
Harriet Martineau
it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.
Harriet Martineau
The lesson taught us by these kindly commentators on my present experience is that dogmatic faith compels the best minds and hearts to narrowness and insolence.
Harriet Martineau
[On being deaf:] How much less pain there is in calmly estimating the enjoyments from which we must separate ourselves, of bravely saying, for once and for ever, 'Let them go,' than in feeling them waste and dwindle, till their very shadows escape from our grasp!
Harriet Martineau
it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.
Harriet Martineau
For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchenthan witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.
Harriet Martineau
The last thing it [government] ought to do is to ground its proceedings on the ignorance of the people, - to yield them that which they will hereafter despise the donors for granting them.
Harriet Martineau
The sick-room becomes the scene of intense convictions and among these, none, it seems to me, is more distinct and powerful than that of the permanent nature of good, and the transient nature of evil.
Harriet Martineau
The progression of emancipation of any class usually, if not always, takes place through the efforts of individuals of that class.
Harriet Martineau
My business in life has been to think and learn, and to speak out with absolute freedom what I have thought and learned. The freedom is itself a positive and never-failing enjoyment to me, after the bondage of my early life.
Harriet Martineau