Life & Wisdom Quote by Mary Astell

Astell skewers hypocrisy with the cool precision of someone who has watched “reason” get weaponized against women and is done pretending it’s an accident. The parenthetical jab - “for vice is always unreasonable” - isn’t decorative; it’s the trap door. She frames moral failure not as a naughty lapse but as a collapse of rationality itself, a direct hit on a culture that prided itself on being governed by reason while excusing men’s appetites as natural and women’s autonomy as dangerous.

Her real target is the man who demands “Vertue” as a service he’s entitled to, not a standard he’s bound to meet. That expectation is “one more” absurdity layered onto a whole stack of them: entitlement, double standards, and the social license that turns personal vice into a public rule. The line works because it sounds like moral philosophy but reads like an indictment of a system: if you reserve virtue for others, you’re not upholding morality, you’re outsourcing it.

Context matters. Astell wrote in a world where female virtue was treated as social infrastructure - essential, policed, and relentlessly public - while male misconduct was routinely privatized or shrugged off. The sentence’s old spelling can’t hide how modern the argument feels: hypocrisy isn’t just a character flaw; it’s a power move. By naming it “unreasonable,” Astell reclaims the era’s prized currency - rationality - and uses it to expose the irrational bargains patriarchy asks everyone else to keep.