Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraft
Mary Wollstonecraftwas an English writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. During her brief career, she wrote novels, treatises, a travel narrative, a history of the French Revolution, a conduct book, and a children's book. Wollstonecraft is best known for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, in which she argues that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. She suggests that both men and women should be treated as rational...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth27 April 1759
Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.
Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices...rather than to root them out.
Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world.
The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.
It would be an endless task to trace the variety of meannesses, cares, and sorrows into which women are plunged by the prevailing opinion that they were created rather to feel than reason, and that all the power they obtain must be obtained by their charms and weaknesses.
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.
Life cannot be seen by an unmoved spectator.
Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.
No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
I love my man as my fellow; but his scepter, real, or usurped, extends not to me, unless the reason of an individual demands my homage; and even then the submission is to reason, and not to man.
The mind will ever be unstable that has only prejudices to rest on, and the current will run with destructive fury when there are no barriers to break its force.
Fondness is a poor substitute for friendship.