No one chooses evil because it is evil; we only mistake it for happiness.
Verified
insightevilhappinessmistakeperceptionSource: A Vindication of the Rights of Men, Mary Wollstonecraft, 1790
Genuine Wollstonecraft, from 'A Vindication of the Rights of Men' (1790), her reply to Burke. Important caveat: the corpus text has been silently modernized and de-gendered. The original reads, in substance, 'No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks' — the corpus version rewrites 'no man/he' as 'no one/we' and drops the closing clause 'the good he seeks.' The underlying attribution is verified; the wording as stored is an edited paraphrase and should ideally be restored to the original or marked as adapted.