Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Quotes

• Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man, for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• Necessity never makes prostitution the business of men’s lives; though numberless are the women who are thus rendered systematically vicious.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• Liberty is the mother of virtue, and if women be, by their very constitution, slaves, and not allowed to breathe the sharp invigorating air of freedom, they must ever languish like exotics, and be reckoned beautiful flaws in nature.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• She was created to be the toy of man, his rattle, and it must jingle in his ears, whenever, dismissing reason, he chooses to be amused.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• Gentleness, docility, and a spaniel-like affection are, on this ground, consistently recommended as the cardinal virtues of the sex; and, disregarding the arbitrary economy of nature, one writer has declared that it is masculine for a woman to be melancholy.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience; but as blind obedience is ever sought for by power, tyrants and sensualists are in the right when they endeavour to keep women in the dark, because the former only want slaves, and the latter a play-thing.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• Men, indeed, appear to me to act in a very unphilosophical manner when they try to secure the good conduct of women by attempting to keep them always in a state of childhood.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• Men, in general, seem to employ their reason to justify prejudices, which they have imbibed, they can scarcely trace how, rather than root them out.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• I now speak of the s*x in general. Many individuals have more sense than their male relatives; and…some women govern their husbands without degrading themselves, because intellect will always govern.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• It is vain to expect virtue from women till they are in some degree independent of men.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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• 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 Godwin

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  Tags in Women, Reason, Man, Freedom

• It is time to effect a revolution in female manners – time to restore to them their lost dignity. It is time to separate unchangeable morals from local manners.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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  Tags in Time, Women

• No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

  Topics in Inspirational

  Tags in Evil

• Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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  Tags in Writing

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

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

  Topics in Love, Society

• 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 Godwin

  Topics in Progress

• Surely something resides in this heart that is not perishable – and life is more than a dream.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

  Topics in Dream, Life

• 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 Godwin

  Topics in Joy

• 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 Godwin

  Topics in Life

• The being cannot be termed rational or virtuous, who obeys any authority, but that of reason.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin

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  Tags in Authority

Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (62)

Birth:	27th April, 1759
Death:	10th September, 1797
Nationality:	British
Profession:	Writer, Philosopher

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