Frances Wright Quotes

#1. And when did mere preaching do any good? Put something in the place of these things. Fill the vacuum of the mind.

Frances Wright

#2. Speak of change, and the world is in alarm. And yet where do we not see change?

Frances Wright

#3. Let us unite on the safe and sure ground of fact and experiment, and we can never err; yet better, we can never differ.

Frances Wright

#4. However novel it may appear, I shall venture the assertion, that, until women assume the place in society which good sense and good feeling alike assign to them, human improvement must advance but feebly.

Frances Wright

#5. A nation to be strong, must be united; to be united, must be equal in condition; to be equal in condition, must be similar inhabits and feeling; to be similar in habits and feeling, must be raised in national institutions as the children of a common family, and citizens of a common country.

Frances Wright

#6. Truth is but approved facts.

Frances Wright

#7. He who lives in the single exercise of his mental faculties, however usefully or curiously directed, is equally an imperfect animal with the man who knows only the exercise of muscles.

Frances Wright

#8. Credulity is always ridiculous.

Frances Wright

#9. The simplest principles become difficult of practice, when habits, formed in error, have been fixed by time, and the simplest truths hard to receive when prejudice has warped the mind.

Frances Wright

#10. Equality! Where is it, if not in education? Equal rights! They cannot exist without equality of instruction.

Frances Wright

#11. Trust me, there are as many ways of living as there are men, and one is no more fit to lead another, than a bird to lead a fish, or a fish a quadruped.

Frances Wright

#12. Your spiritual teachers caution you against enquiry
tell you not to read certain books; not to listen to certain people; to beware of profane learning; to submit your reason, and to receive their doctrines for truths. Such advice renders them suspicious counsellors.

Frances Wright

#13. Surely it is time to examine into the meaning of words and the nature of things, and to arrive at simple facts, not received upon the dictum of learned authorities, but upon attentive personal observation of what is passing around us.

Frances Wright

#14. We have ... dreamed so much and observed so little, that our imaginations have grown larger than the world we live in, and our judgments have dwindled down to a point.

Frances Wright

#15. The hired preachers of all sects, creeds, and religions, never do, and never can, teach any thing but what is in conformity with the opinions of those who pay them.

Frances Wright

#16. Moral truth, resting entirely upon the ascertained consequences of actions, supposes a process of observation and reasoning.

Frances Wright

#17. But while human liberty has engaged the attention of the enlightened, and enlisted the feelings of the generous of all civilized nations, may we not enquire if this liberty has been rightly understood?

Frances Wright

#18. I am neither Jew nor Gentile, Mahomedan nor Theist; I am but a member of the human family ...

Frances Wright

#19. Many are called impious, not for having a worse, but a different religion from their neighbors; and many atheistical, not for the denying of God, but for thinking somewhat peculiarly concerning him.

Frances Wright

#20. If we bring not the good courage of minds covetous of truth, and truth only, prepared to hear all things, and decide upon all things, according to evidence, we should do more wisely to sit down contented in ignorance, than to bestir ourselves only to reap disappointment.

Frances Wright

#21. Now here is a departure from the first principle of true ethics. Here we find ideas of moral wrong and moral right associated with something else than beneficial action. The consequent is, we lose sight of the real basis of morals, and substitute a false one.

Frances Wright

#22. We have seen that no religion stands on the basis of things known; none bounds its horizon within the field of human observation; and, therefore, as it can never present us with indisputable facts, so must it ever be at once a source of error and contention.

Frances Wright

#23. Fathers and husbands! do ye not also understand this fact? Do ye not see how, in the mental bondage of your wives and fair companions, ye yourselves are bound?

Frances Wright

#24. Love of power more frequently originates in vanity than pride (two qualities, by the way, which are often confounded) and is, consequently, yet more peculiarly the sin of little than of great minds.

Frances Wright

#25. We have broken down the self-respecting spirit of man with nursery tales and priestly threats, and we dare to assert, that inproportion as we have prostrated our understanding and degraded our nature, we have exhibited virtue, wisdom, and happiness, in our words, our actions, and our lives!

Frances Wright

#26. Awaken its powers, and it will respect itself.

Frances Wright

#27. All learning is useful, all the sciences are curious, all the arts are beautiful; but the most useful, most curious and most beautiful is perfect knowledge and perfect government of oneself.

Frances Wright

#28. The sciences have ever been the surest guides to virtue.

Frances Wright

#29. Turn your churches into halls of science, and devote your leisure day to the study of your own bodies, the analysis of your own minds, and the examination of the fair material world which extends around you!

Frances Wright

#30. Religion may be defined thus: a belief in, and homage rendered to, existences unseen and causes unknown.

Frances Wright

#31. It has already been observed that women, wherever placed, however high or low in the scale of cultivation, hold the destinies of human kind. Men will ever rise or fall to the level of the other sex.

Frances Wright

#32. How are men to be secured in any rights without instruction; how to be secured in the equal exercise of those rights without equality of instruction? By instruction understand me to mean knowledge - just knowledge; not talent, not genius, not inventive mental powers.

Frances Wright

#33. No man can see his own prejudices ...

Frances Wright

#34. A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence.

Frances Wright

#35. What were the glories of the sun, if we knew not the gloom of darkness?

Frances Wright

#36. Of the thousands who have paid homage to virtue, barely one has thought to inspect the pedestal on which it stands.

Frances Wright

#37. Ambition is the necessary spur of a great mind to great action; when acting upon a weak mind it impels it to absurdity, or sours it with discontent.

Frances Wright

#38. [Men] are incomprehensible animals... They walk about boasting of their wisdom, strength, and sovereignty, while they have not sense so much as to swallow an apple with the aid of an Eve to put it down their throats.

Frances Wright

#39. It was in this year, 1828, that the standard of "the Christian Party in Politics" was openly unfurled ... This was an evident attempt, through the influence of the clergy over the female mind - until this hour lamentably neglected in the United States - to effect a union of Church and State.

Frances Wright

#40. Be not afraid! In admitting a creator, refuse not to examine his creation; and take not the assertions of creatures like yourselves, in place of the evidence of your senses and the conviction of your understanding.

Frances Wright

#41. The best road to correct reasoning is by physical science; the way to trace effects to causes is through physical science; the only corrective, therefore, of superstition is physical science.

Frances Wright

#42. It would be impossible for women to stand in higher estimation than they do here. The deference that is paid to them at all times and in all places has often occasioned me as much surprise as pleasure.

Frances Wright

#43. Equality is the soul of liberty; there is, in fact, no liberty without it.

Frances Wright

#44. Our religious belief usurps the place of our sensations, our imaginations of our judgment. We no longer look to actions, trace their consequences, and then deduce the rule; we first make the rule, and then, right or wrong, force the action to square with it.

Frances Wright

#45. You have heard of, and studied various systems of philosophy; but real philosophy is opposed to all systems.

Frances Wright

#46. All that I say is, examine, inquire. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against. Know why you believe, understand what you believe, and possess a reason for the faith that is in you.

Frances Wright

#47. Look into the nature of things. Search out the grounds of your opinions, the for and against.

Frances Wright

#48. The yearly expenses of the existing religious systemexceed in these United States twenty millions of dollars. Twenty millions! For teaching what? Things unseen and causes unknown! ... Twenty millions would more than suffice to make us wise; and alas! do they not more than suffice to make us foolish?

Frances Wright

#49. Persecution for opinion is the master vice of society.

Frances Wright

#50. It is in vain that we would circumscribe the power of one half of our race, and that half by far the most important and influential.

Frances Wright

#51. The condition of women affords in all countries the best criterion by which to judge the character of men.

Frances Wright

#52. We hear of the wealth of nations, of the powers of production, of the demand and supply of markets, and we forget that these words mean no more, if they mean any thing, then the happiness, and the labor, and the necessities of men.

Frances Wright

#53. There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being.

Frances Wright

#54. The world is full of religion, and full of misery and crime.

Frances Wright

#55. To give liberty to a slave before he understands its value is, perhaps, rather to impose a penalty than to bestow a blessing ...

Frances Wright

#56. Instead of establishing facts, we have to overthrow errors; instead of ascertaining what is, we have to chase from our imaginations what is not.

Frances Wright

#57. The language of truth is too simple for inexperienced ears.

Frances Wright

#58. If they exert it not for good, they will for evil; if they advance not knowledge, they will perpetuate ignorance.

Frances Wright

#59. [May] the olive of peace and brotherhood be embraced by the white man and the black, and their children, approached in feeling and education, gradually blend into one their blood and their hue.

Frances Wright

#60. Pets, like their owners, tend to expand a little over the Christmas period.

Frances Wright

#61. The happiness of a people is the only rational object of government, and the only object for which a people, free to choose, can have a government at all.

Frances Wright

#62. Credulity is always a ridiculous, often a dangerous failing: it has made of many a clever man, a fool; and of many a good man, a knave.

Frances Wright

#63. It is not that religion is merely useless, it is mischievous. It is mischievous by its idle terrors; it is mischievous by its false morality; it is mischievous by its hypocrisy; by its fanaticism; by its dogmatism; by its threats; by its hopes; by its promises.

Frances Wright

#64. The existing principle of selfish interest and competition has been carried to its extreme point; and, in its progress, has isolated the heart of man, blunted the edge of his finest sensibilities, and annihilated all his most generous impulses and sympathies.

Frances Wright

#65. Do we exert our own liberties without injury to others - we exert them justly; do we exert them at the expense of others - unjustly. And, in thus doing, we step from the sure platform of liberty upon the uncertain threshold of tyranny.

Frances Wright

#66. I never walked through the streets of any city with as much satisfaction as those of Philadelphia. The neatness and cleanliness of all animate and inanimate things, houses, pavements, and citizens, is not to be surpassed.

Frances Wright

#67. It will appear evident upon attentive consideration that equality of intellectual and physical advantages is the only sure foundation of liberty, and that such equality may best, and perhaps only, be obtained by a union of interests and cooperation in labor.

Frances Wright

#68. The knowledge of one generation is the ignorance of the next.

Frances Wright

#69. The mode of delivering a truth makes, for the most part, as much impression on the mind of the listener as the truth itself.

Frances Wright

#70. I feel virtuous because my soul is at ease.

Frances Wright

#71. An opinion, right or wrong, can never constitute a moral offense, nor be in itself a moral obligation. It may be mistaken; it may involve an absurdity, or a contradiction. It is a truth; or it is an error: it can never be a crime or a virtue.

Frances Wright

#72. Do not confound noise with fame. The man who is remembered, is not always honored.

Frances Wright

#73. These will vary in every human being; but knowledge is the same for every mind, and every mind may and ought to be trained to receive it.

Frances Wright

#74. Man has been adjudged a social animal.

Frances Wright