Harriet Martineau Quotes

Harriet Martineau delivers sharp reflections on dignity and class that push you to see social unfairness.

17 quotes

1. If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

2. For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen ... than witness the subservience in which the menial class is held in Europe.

3. Fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered.

4. What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable, than that of teaching?

5. Essays by Harriet Martineau at Quotidiana.org

6. it is a testament to the strength and purity of the democratic sentiment in the country, that the republic has not been overthrown by its newspapers.

7. School is no place of education for any children whatever till their minds are well put in action. This is the work which has to be done at home, and which may be done in all homes where the mother is a sensible woman.

8. Authorship has never been with me a matter of choice. I have not done it for amusement, or for money, or for fame, or for any reason but because I could not help it.

9. it is the worst humiliation and grievance of the suffering, that they cause suffering.

10. I wrote because I could not help it. There was something that I wanted to say, and I said it: that was all. The fame and the money and the usefulness might or might not follow. It was not by my endeavor if they did.

11. The instruction furnished is not good enough for the youth of such a country ... There is not even any systematic instruction given on political morals: an enormous deficiency in a republic.

12. [I] wish that the land-tax went a little more according to situation than it does. 'Tis really ridiculous, how one has to pay five times as much as another, without any reason that ever I heard tell.

13. Who is apt, on occasion, to assign a multitude of reasons when one will do? This is a sure sign of weakness in argument.

14. It is hard to tell which is worse; the wide diffusion of things that are not true, or the suppression of things that are true.

15. Religion is a temper, not a pursuit. It is the moral atmosphere in which human beings are to live and move. Men do not live to breathe: they breathe to live.

16. Moral excellence has no regard to classes and professions.

17. I want to be a free rover on the breezy common of the universe.