Mary Wollstonecraft — "Ignorance is a frail base for virtue."
Ignorance is a frail base for virtue.
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More from Mary Wollstonecraft
"I shall be at a loss to discover why marriage has been called the tomb of love."
"I am a strange compound of weakness and resolution! All my feelings are on the tortured rack; but I will not be a fool, if I can help it."
"I have a heart that is ready to burst with the tenderest affection, and a head that is full of the most exalted notions."
"A great many women and men, too, make a point of never thinking about a subject without having taken a side first."
"The mind, in order to be strong, must be free."
About Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797)
English writer and proto-feminist philosopher whose A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) is the founding text of modern feminist theory. Closely associated with Thomas Paine (Rights of Man co-conspirator and revolutionary contemporary) and William Godwin (her husband and philosopher of anarchism). For an intellectual contrast, see Edmund Burke, Anglo-Irish conservative and parliamentarian — Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) was the explicit target of Wollstonecraft's first book — A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790), written in the weeks after Burke's appeared. She extended the argument to women in her second Vindication two years later. Burke's tradition-and-prescription conservatism is the worldview Wollstonecraft's career was structured against.