Date: December 1790

"Not having leisure or patience to follow this desultory writer through all the devious tracks in which his fancy has started fresh game, I have confined my strictures, in a great measure, to the grand principles at which he has levelled many ingenious arguments in a very specious garb."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"The man has been changed into an artificial monster by the station in which he was born, and the consequent homage that benumbed his faculties like the torpedo’s touch."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"The passions are necessary auxiliaries of reason: a present impulse pushes us forward, and when we discover that the game did not deserve the chace, we find that we have gone over much ground, and not only gained many new ideas, but a habit of thinking."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: December 1790

"[A]n immoderate desire to please contracts the faculties, and immerges, to borrow the idea of a great philosopher, the soul in matter, till it becomes unable to mount on the wing of contemplation."

— Wollstonecraft, Mary (1759-1797)

Date: 1791

"Every desire is a viper in the bosom, who, while he was chill, was harmless; but when warmth gave him strength, exerted it in poison."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1791

"In his soul was the serpent coil'd round in his heart, hid from the light, as in a cleft rock"

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1791

"If his imagination be not sickly and feeble, it 'wings its distant way' far beyond himself, and views the world in unceasing activity of every sort."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: January 19, 1791

"But it is then, and basking in the sunshine of unmerited fortune, that low, sordid, ungenerous, and reptile souls swell with their hoarded poisons; it is then that they display their odious splendour, and shine out in full lustre of their native villainy and baseness."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1791, 1794

"His visit was not long, but before he went he fixed a scorpion in the heart of Charlotte, whose venom embittered every future hour of her life."

— Rowson, Susanna (1762-1828)

Date: 1791

"I suppose, Sir, he has thought superficially, and seized the first notions which occurred to his mind. … Why then, Sir, still he is like a dog"

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)