Mary Hays Quotes & Sayings

Like children, we have dreamt, that what gratifies our desires, or contributes to our convenience to-day, will prove equally useful and satisfactory to-morrow, without reflecting on the growth of the body, the change of humours, the new objects, and the new situations, which every succeeding hour brings in its train. — Mary Hays

I put in no claims either for happiness, for gratification, or even for the common comforts of life: yet, surely, I had a right to exist! — Mary Hays

Bigotry is ever the child of ignorance, and the cultivation of the understanding is the only radical cure for it ... — Mary Hays

Drown'd, all drown'd,
In that great sea which nothing disembogues. — Mary Hays

Coercive measures may have a restraining effect for a time, but can never subdue an untractable spirit: it is only by engaging the affections and enlarging the understanding, that the heart can be meliorated or principles be formed; for like a bow forcibly bent, the mind recoils from oppression with elastic power. — Mary Hays

Of all the systems - if indeed a bundle of contradictions and absurdities may be called a system - which human nature in its moments of intoxication has produced, that which men have contrived with a view to forming the minds and regulating the conduct of women, is perhaps the most completely absurd. — Mary Hays