Harriet Martineau - Society in America (1837)

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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.

Harriet Martineau
If there is any country on earth where the course of true love may be expected to run smooth, it is America.

Harriet Martineau
But is it not the fact that religion emanates from the nature, from the moral state of the individual? Is it not therefore true that unless the nature be completely exercised, the moral state harmonized, the religion cannot be healthy?

Harriet Martineau
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.

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

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
Any one must see at a glance that if men and women marry those whom they do not love, they must love those whom they do not marry.

Harriet Martineau
The sum and substance of female education in America, as in England, is training women to consider marriage as the sole object in life, and to pretend that they do not think so.

Harriet Martineau
Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction: but laws and customs cannot be creative of virtue: they may encourage and help to preserve it; but they cannot originate it.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
In the United States, as elsewhere, there are, and have always been, two parties in politics... It is remarkable how nearly their positive statements of political doctrine agree, while they differ in almost every possible application of their common principles.

Harriet Martineau
The clergy complain of the enormous spread of bold books, from the infidel tract to the latest handling of the miracle question.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
Wealth and opinion were practically worshipped before Washington opened his eyes on the sun which was to light him to his deeds; and the worship of Opinion is, at this day, the established religion of the United States.

Harriet Martineau
Is it to be understood that the principles of the Declaration of Independence bear no relation to half of the human race?

Harriet Martineau
This noble word [women], spirit-stirring as it passes over English ears, is in America banished, and 'ladies' and 'females' substituted: the one to English taste mawkish and vulgar; the other indistinctive and gross.

Harriet Martineau
I saw no poor men, except a few intemperate ones. I saw some very poor women; but God and man know that the time has not come for women to make their injuries even heard of.

Harriet Martineau
The last degree of honesty has always been, and is still considered incompatible with statesmanship. To hunger and thirst after righteousness has been naturally, as it were, supposed a disqualification for affairs.

Harriet Martineau
It is not quite true that there are no good letters written in America: among my own circle of correspondents there, there are ladies and gentlemen whose letters would stand a comparison with any for frankness, grace, and epistolary beauty of every kind. But I am not aware of any medium between this excellence and the boarding-school insignificance which characterizes the rest.

Harriet Martineau
During the present interval between the feudal age and the coming time, when life and its occupations will be freely thrown open to women as to men, the condition of the female working classes is such that if its sufferings were but made known, emotions of horror and shame would tremble through the whole of society.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
The systematic abuse with which the newspapers of one side assail every candidate coming forward on the other, is the cause of many honorable men, who have a regard to their reputation, being deterred from entering public life; and of the people being thus deprived of some better servants than any they have.

Harriet Martineau
I have no sympathy for those who, under any pressure of circumstances, sacrifice their heart's-love for legal prostitution.

Harriet Martineau
Public opinion, — a tyrant, sitting in the dark, wrapt up in mystification and vague terrors of obscurity; deriving power no one knows from whom... — but irresistible in its power to quell thought, to repress action, to silence conviction.

Harriet Martineau
Even if their outward fortunes could be absolutely equalized, there would be, from individual constitution alone, an aristocracy and a democracy in every land. The fearful by nature would compose an aristocracy, the hopeful by nature a democracy, were all other causes of divergence done away.

Harriet Martineau
Marriage... is still the imperfect institution it must remain while women continue to be ill-educated, passive, and subservient.

Harriet Martineau
If the national mind of America be judged of by its legislation, it is of a very high order... If the American nation be judged of by its literature, it may be pronounced to have no mind at all.

Harriet Martineau
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.

Harriet Martineau
Milton must have travelled in Michigan before he wrote the garden parts of Paradise Lost.

Harriet Martineau
Scarcely anything that I observed in the United States caused me so much sorrow as the contemptuous estimate of the people entertained by those who were bowing the knee to be permitted to serve them.

Harriet Martineau