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Men and women must be educated, in a great degree, by the opinions and manners of the society they live in.
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.
Children, I grant, should be innocent but when the epithet is applied to men, or women, it is but a civil term for weakness.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour.
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.
No man chooses evil because it is evil he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.