The endeavor to keep alive any hoary establishment beyond its natural date is often pernicious and always useless.

Executions, far from being useful examples to the survivors, have, I am persuaded, a quite contrary effect, by hardening the heart they ought to terrify. Besides, the fear of an ignominious death, I believe, never deterred anyone from the commission of a crime, because in committing it the mind is roused to activity about present circumstances.

No man chooses evil because it's evil. He only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.

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?

Nothing, I am sure, calls forth the faculties so much as the being obliged to struggle with the world.

Strengthen the female mind by enlarging it, and there will be an end to blind obedience.

The power of generalizing ideas, of drawing comprehensive conclusions from individual observations, is the only acquirement, for an immortal being, that really deserves the name of knowledge.