How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

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.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

If women be educated for dependence; that is, to act according to the will of another fallible being, and submit, right or wrong, to power, where are we to stop?
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

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 Quote

Independence I have long considered as the grand blessing of life, the basis of every virtue; and independence I will ever secure by contracting my wants, though I were to live on a barren heath.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

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.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

Learn from me, if not by my precepts, then by my example, how dangerous is the pursuit of knowledge and how much happier is that man who believes his native town to be the world than he who aspires to be greater than his nature will allow.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

Make women rational creatures, and free citizens, and they will quickly become good wives; - that is, if men do not neglect the duties of husbands and fathers.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

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 Quote

Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

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 Quote

Women have seldom sufficient employment to silence their feelings; a round of little cares, or vain pursuits frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense.
- Mary Wollstonecraft Quote