Education Quote by Samuel Richardson

Richardson is doing something sly here: he concedes the radical premise (that “geniuses are equal”) only to expose how thoroughly society rigs the game anyway. The line reads like a calm observation, but it’s a moral accusation delivered in the cool language of common sense. By framing inequality as the predictable “difference in the education of men and women,” he shifts the conversation away from innate capacity and onto infrastructure: access, training, expectation, permission. It’s less a compliment to women than an indictment of the system that forces talent to compete with deprivation.

The key word is “must.” Richardson isn’t describing a tendency; he’s describing an inevitability produced by design. “Must give” makes the advantage feel automatic, almost mechanical, which is precisely the point: outcomes that look like merit are often the afterglow of investment. Even the phrase “great advantages” carries an edge. It’s not “some benefit” or “a head start”; it’s decisive leverage, the kind that compounds over a lifetime.

As an 18th-century novelist, Richardson understood education not as a neutral good but as a pipeline into authority: literacy, conversation, moral reasoning, social mobility. In his world, women were trained for virtue and marriageability, men for public life. The subtext is that “genius” without cultivation is stranded. If equal brilliance produces unequal results, the inequality isn’t evidence of nature; it’s evidence of policy masquerading as destiny.