Frances Wright
Frances Wright
Frances Wrightalso widely known as Fanny Wright, was a Scottish-born lecturer, writer, freethinker, feminist, abolitionist, and social reformer, who became a US citizen in 1825. The same year l, she founded the Nashoba Commune in Tennessee, as a utopian community to prepare slaves for emancipation. She inteded to create an egalitarian place, but it lasted only three years. Her Views of Society and Manners in Americabrought her the most attention as a critique of the new nation...
NationalityScottish
ProfessionWriter
expecting huge scottish-writer swamped tremendous
I have been swamped with tremendous response. I am expecting a huge crowd.
civilized engaged enlisted generous human rightly
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?
rights justice instruction
Equality! Where is it, if not in education? Equal rights! They cannot exist without equality of instruction.
rights limits honest
There is but one honest limit to the rights of a sentient being; it is where they touch the rights of another sentient being.
virtue guides
The sciences have ever been the surest guides to virtue.
practice errors mind
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.
knowledge science air
Knowledge signifies things known. Where there are no things known, there is no knowledge. Where there are no things to be known, there can be no knowledge. We have observed that every science, that is, every branch of knowledge, is compounded of certain facts, of which our sensations furnish the evidence. Where no such evidence is supplied, we are without data; we are without first premises; and when, without these, we attempt to build up a science, we do as those who raise edifices without foundations. And what do such builders construct? Castles in the air.
science superstitions way
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.
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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.
pedestal virtue homage
Of the thousands who have paid homage to virtue, barely one has thought to inspect the pedestal on which it stands.
pride power two
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.
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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.
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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.
attaching merit necessary religious
A necessary consequent of religious belief is the attaching ideas of merit to that belief, and of demerit to its absence.