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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.

Mary Wollstonecraft

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Mary Wollstonecraft
Age: 38 †
Born: 1759
Born: April 27
Died: 1797
Died: September 10
Businessperson
Essayist
Governess
Historian
Novelist
Philosopher
Translator
Travel Writer
Writer
Mary Godwin
Mr. Cresswick
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
Character
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Popular
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Literature
Age
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Carried

More quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft

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... we never do any thing well, unless we love it for its own sake.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Women all want to be ladies, which is simply to have nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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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.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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I must be allowed to add some explanatory remarks to bring the subject home to reason-to that sluggish reason, which supinely takes opinions on trust, and obstinately supports them to spare itself the labour of thinking.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Perhaps the seeds of false-refinement, immorality, and vanity, have ever been shed by the great. Weak, artificial beings, raised above the common wants and defections of their race, in a premature and unnatural manner, undermine the very foundation of virtue, and spread corruption through the whole mass of society!
Mary Wollstonecraft
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The graceful ivy, clasping the oak that supported it, would form a whole in which strength and beauty would be equally conspicuous.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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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.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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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.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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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.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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The birthright of man ... is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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...I scarcely am able to govern my muscles, when I see a man start with eager, and serious solicitude, to lift a handkerchief, orshut a door, when the lady could have done it herself, had she only moved a pace or two.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Men with common minds seldom break through general rules. Prudence is ever the resort of weakness and they rarely go as far as as they may in any undertaking, who are determined not to go beyond it on any account.
Mary Wollstonecraft