Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.
In fact, it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason.
An air of fashion, which is but a badge of slavery ... proves that the soul has not a strong individual character.
I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.
We cannot, without depraving our minds, endeavour to please a lover or husband, but in proportion as he pleases us.
In this metropolis a number of lurking leeches infamously gain subsistence by practicing on the credulity of women.
Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated.
When man, governed by reasonable laws, enjoys his natural freedom, let him despise woman, if she do not share it with him.
I begin to love this little creature, and to anticipate his birth as a fresh twist to a knot, which I do not wish to untie.
Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.
A king is always a king - and a woman always a woman: his authority and her sex ever stand between them and rational converse
Only that education deserves emphatically to be termed cultivation of the mind which teaches young people how to begin to think.
Friendship is a serious affection; the most sublime of all affections, because it is founded on principle, and cemented by time.
Till women are more rationally educated, the progress in human virtue and improvement in knowledge must receive continual checks.
It is the preservation of the species, not of individuals, which appears to be the design of Deity throughout the whole of nature.
The graceful ivy, clasping the oak that supported it, would form a whole in which strength and beauty would be equally conspicuous.
The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
... the whole tenour of female education ... tends to render the best disposed romantic and inconstant; and the remainder vain and mean.
In the education of women, the cultivation of the understanding is always subordinate to the acquirement of some corporeal accomplishment.
Women all want to be ladies, which is simply to have nothing to do, but listlessly to go they scarcely care where, for they cannot tell what.
When any prevailing prejudice is attacked, the wise will consider, and leave the narrow-minded to rail with thoughtless vehemence at innovation.
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.
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.
The same energy of character which renders a man a daring villain would have rendered him useful in society, had that society been well organized.
For years I have endeavored to calm an impetuous tide -- laboring to make my feelings take an orderly course -- it was striving against the stream.
Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government.
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.
The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.
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?
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.
I think schools, as they are now regulated, the hot-beds of vice and folly, and the knowledge of human nature supposedly attained there, merely cunning selfishness.
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.
From the respect paid to property flow, as from a poisoned fountain, most of the evils and vices which render this world such a dreary scene to the contemplative mind.
A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.
The birthright of man ... is such a degree of liberty, civil and religious, as is compatible with the liberty of every other individual with whom he is united in a social compact.
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.
The absurd duty, too often inculcated, of obeying a parent only on account of his being a parent, shackles the mind, and prepares it for a slavish submission to any power but reason.
I love 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 power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations, is the only acquirement, for an immortal being, that really deserves the name of knowledge.
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.
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.
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.
Men with common minds seldom break through general rules. Prudence is ever the resort of weakness; and they rarely go as far as as they may in any undertaking, who are determined not to go beyond it on any account.
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.
My own sex, I hope, will excuse me, if I treat them like rational creatures, instead of flattering their fascinating graces, and viewing them as if they were in a state of perpetual childhood, unable to stand alone.