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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

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Mary Wollstonecraft
Age: 38 †
Born: 1759
Born: April 27
Died: 1797
Died: September 10
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Mary Godwin
Mr. Cresswick
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin
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Undertakings
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More quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft

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... the whole tenour of female education ... tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant and the remainder vain and mean.
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.
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Let us, my dear contemporaries, arise above such narrow prejudices. If wisdom be desirable on its own account, if virtue, to deserve the name, must be founded on knowledge, let us endeavour to strengthen our minds by reflection till our heads become a balance for our hearts.
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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It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.
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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Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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Every political good carried to the extreme must be productive of evil.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.
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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.
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Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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How frequently has melancholy and even misanthropy taken possession of me, when the world has disgusted me, and friends have proven unkind. I have then considered myself as a particle broken off from the grand mass of mankind.
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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We reason deeply, when we forcibly feel.
Mary Wollstonecraft
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When any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation.
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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I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves.
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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Slavery to monarchs and ministers, which the world will be long freeing itself from, and whose deadly grasp stops the progress of the human mind, is not yet abolished.
Mary Wollstonecraft