 I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour. |
| Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Children, I grant, should be innocent; but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| 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. |
| Nothing contributes so much to tranquilizing the mind as a steady purpose - a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye. |
| 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. |
| The beginning is always today. |
| 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. |
| How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions? |
| Virtue can only flourish among equals. |
| Women ought to have representatives, instead of being arbitrarily governed without any direct share allowed them in the deliberations of government. |
| Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave? |
