Browse 6 quotations connecting Mary Wollstonecraft with Integrity, with meanings, source notes and related themes.
Each quotation is included because its central idea connects with this theme, not simply because one matching word appears in the sentence.
Sources represented here include A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution. Keeping the work and source note beside each quotation makes differences in setting, speaker and emphasis easier to see.
Sources represented here include A Vindication of the Rights of Men, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution.
“Reverencing the rights of humanity, I shall dare to assert them.”
Wollstonecraft presents public argument as an obligation to defend human rights even when ridicule or social pressure makes such advocacy uncomfortable.
Source note: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, opening pages; the sentence immediately follows her statement that she contends for the rights of men and liberty of reason.
“truth, in morals, has ever appeared to me the essence of the sublime; and, in taste, simplicity the only criterion of the beautiful.”
Wollstonecraft makes moral truth and aesthetic simplicity standards of seriousness, rejecting ornate politeness when it conceals what a writer actually believes.
Source note: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, opening letter to Edmund Burke, second edition (1790); this sentence follows Wollstonecraft’s refusal to disguise her sentiments behind courtly politeness.
“truly sublime is the character that acts from principle, and governs the inferior springs of activity without slackening their vigour;”
The passage praises principled character that can use emotion and energy without allowing immediate feeling to overrule deliberate judgment.
Source note: A Vindication of the Rights of Men; this clause appears in Wollstonecraft’s contrast between habit, manipulated passion, and a character governed by principle.
“Sensibility is the manie of the day, and compassion the virtue which is to cover a multitude of vices, whilst justice is left to mourn in sullen silence, and balance truth in vain.”
The polemical contrast warns that displays of feeling can become morally evasive when sympathy is praised while justice and truth are neglected.
Source note: A Vindication of the Rights of Men; Wollstonecraft is criticizing sentimental rhetoric in Burke, so the passage should not be read as a rejection of compassion itself.
“Women, I allow, may have different duties to fulfil; but they are human duties, and the principles that should regulate the discharge of them, I sturdily maintain, must be the same.”
Different roles do not require different moral standards; Wollstonecraft argues for common principles of responsibility and virtue.
Source note: A Vindication of the Rights of Woman; the passage rejects a separate moral standard built around sex rather than shared human duties.
“One principal of action is sufficient—Respect thyself.”
Wollstonecraft makes self-respect a moral standard rather than self-flattery: conduct should remain compatible with one’s own sense of truth and justice instead of being reorganized around gaining a respectable social position.
Source note: An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution, Project Gutenberg #68724. Wollstonecraft connects “Respect thyself” with religion, justice and self-love while criticizing social arrangements that encourage people to sacrifice truthful character for status.