Mary Wollstonecraft
Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.
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.
Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave?
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.
Virtue can only flourish among equals.
The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.
The beginning is always today.
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.
Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable - and life is more than a dream.
Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.
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.
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, the good he seeks.
Men neglect the duties incumbent on man, yet are treated like demi-gods; religion is also separated from morality by a ceremonial veil, yet men wonder that the world is almost, literally speaking, a den of sharpers or oppressors.
Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.
Man preys on man; and you mourn for the idle tapestry that decorated a gothic pillar, and the dronish bell that summoned the fat priest to prayer.
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.
Let not men then in the pride of power, use the same arguments that tyrannic kings and venal ministers have used, and fallaciously assert that women ought to be subjected because she has always been so.
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.