Date: 1792

"In this style argue tyrants of every denomination, from the weak king to the weak father of a family; they are all eager to crush reason, yet always assert that they usurp its throne only to be useful."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"More noble than the sycophant, whose art / Must heap with taudry flowers thy hated shrine; / I envy not the meed thou canst impart / To crown his service--while, tho' Pride combine / With Fraud to crush me--my unfetter'd heart / Still to the Mountain Nymph may offer mine."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1792

"So ductile is the understanding, and yet so stubborn, that the associations which depend on adventitious circumstances, during the period that the body takes to arrive at maturity, can seldom be disentangled by reason."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"One idea calls up another, its old associate, and memory, faithful to the first impressions, particularly when the intellectual powers are not employed to cool our sensations, retraces them with mechanical exactness."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"This habitual slavery, to first impressions, has a more baneful effect on the female than the male character, because business and other dry employments of the understanding, tend to deaden the feelings and break associations that do violence to reason."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1792

"Thus degraded, her reason, her misty reason! is employed rather to burnish than to snap her chains."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1791, 1792

"For thou to me canst sov'reign bliss impart, / Thy mind my empire--and my throne thy heart."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1792

"For any kind of reading, I think better than leaving a blank still blank, because the mind must receive a degree of enlargement and obtain a little strength by a slight exertion of its thinking powers."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1793, 1797

"Then, while each hideous image to his mind, / Rises terrific, o'er a bleeding corse / Stumbling he falls."

— Smith, Charlotte (1749-1806)

Date: 1793

"Tears from our sex are not always the result of grief; they are frequently no more than little sympathetic tributes which we pay to our fellow-beings, while the mind and the heart are steeled against the weakness which our eyes indicate"

— Inchbald [née Simpson], Elizabeth (1753-1821)