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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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Mary Wollstonecraft
Age: 38 †
Born: 1759
Born: April 27
Died: 1797
Died: September 10
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Mary Godwin
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More quotes by 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, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices...rather than to root them out.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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I think I love most people best when they are in adversity for pity is one of my prevailing passions.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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The appetites will rule if the mind is vacant.
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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Love, from its very nature, must be transitory.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.
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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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 endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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As a sex, women are habitually indolent and every thing tends to make them so.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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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.
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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I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands. Meek wives are, in general, foolish mothers wanting their children to love them best, and take their part, in secret, against the father, who is held up as a scarecrow.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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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.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Hereditary property sophisticates the mind, and the unfortunate victims to it ... swathed from their birth, seldom exert the locomotive faculty of body or mind and, thus viewing every thing through one medium, and that a false one, they are unable to discern in what true merit and happiness consist.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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...men endeavor to sink us still lower, merely to render us alluring objects for a moment and women, intoxicated by the adoration which men, under the influence of their senses, pay them, do not seek to obtain a durable interest in their hearts, or to become the friends of the fellow creatures who find amusement in their society.
Mary Wollstonecraft