Top 32 Quotes by Mary Wollstonecraft

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.

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.

The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.

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.

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.

Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.

Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.

It appears to me impossible that I should cease to exist, or that this active, restless spirit, equally alive to joy and sorrow, should be only organized dust.

It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.

In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.