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Wherever the appearance of a conventional aristocracy exists in America, it must arise from wealth, as it cannot from birth. An aristocracy of mere wealth is vulgar everywhere. In a republic, it is vulgar in the extreme.

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
Cannot
Extremes
America
Arise
Must
Appearance
Aristocracy
Exists
Vulgar
Everywhere
Conventional
Mere
Republic
Birth
Extreme
Wealth
Wherever

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I loved, as I still love, the most monotonous life possible.
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The habit of dwelling on the past, has a narrowing as well as a debilitating influence. Behind us, there is a small, - an almost insignificant measure of time before us, there is an eternity. It is the natural tendency of the mind to magnify the one, and to diminish the other.
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. . . is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?
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I wrote because I could not help it. There was something that I wanted to say, and I said it: that was all. The fame and the money and the usefulness might or might not follow. It was not by my endeavor if they did.
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[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!
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Self-denial is taught much better by inspiring the love of our neighbor, than by the prohibition of innocent comforts and pleasures. Spirituality is much better taught by making spiritual things the objects of supreme desire, than by commanding an ostentatious avoidance of the enjoyments of life.
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The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.
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it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are.
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Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions.
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Men who pass most comfortably through this world are those who possess good digestions and hard hearts.
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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.
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Happiness consists in the full employment of our faculties in some pursuit.
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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.
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The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs.
Harriet Martineau
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I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.
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It is my deliberate opinion that the one essential requisite of human welfare in all ways is scientific knowledge of human nature.
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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.
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It never enters the lady's head that the wet-nurse's baby probably dies.
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There is no theory of a God, of an author of Nature, of an origin of the Universe, which is not utterly repugnant to my faculties. . .
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While feeling far less injured by toil than my friends took for granted I must be, I yet was always aware of the strong probability that my life would end as the lives of hard literary workers usually end, - in paralysis, with months or years of imbecility.
Harriet Martineau