The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.
The divine right of husbands, like the divine right of kings, may, it is hoped, in this enlightened age, be contested without danger.
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.
Virtue can only flourish among equals.
How can a rational being be ennobled by any thing that is not obtained by its own exertions?
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.
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.
I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.
Children, I grant, should be innocent but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.
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 their faculties have room to unfold, and their virtues to gain strength, and then determine where the whole sex must stand in the intellectual scale.
No man chooses evil because it is evil he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.
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.
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 torment...
I never wanted but your heart--that gone, you have nothing more to give.
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.
Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.
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 sens...
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...