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William Godwin quotes - page 3
Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.
William Godwin
Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.
William Godwin
But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.
William Godwin
The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.
William Godwin
Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.
William Godwin
There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers; we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.
William Godwin
Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.
William Godwin
Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.
William Godwin
Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.
William Godwin
He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil.
William Godwin
Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.
William Godwin
Everything understood by the term co-operation is in some sense an evil.
William Godwin
It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.
William Godwin
Above all, the poet, whose judgment should be clear, whose feelings should be uniform and sound, whose sense should be alive to every impression and hardened to none, who is the legislator of generations and the moral instructor of the world, ought never to have been a practising lawyer, or ought speedily to have quitted so dangerous an engagement.
William Godwin
If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such.
William Godwin
Invisible things are the only realities; invisible things alone are the things that shall remain.
William Godwin
The cause of justice is the cause of humanity. Its advocates should overflow with universal good will. We should love this cause, for it conduces to the general happiness of mankind.
William Godwin
There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape.
William Godwin
God himself has no right to be a tyrant.
William Godwin
Obey this may be right but beware of reverence. Government is nothing but regulated force force is its appropriate claim upon your attention. It is the business of individuals to persuade the tendency of concentrated strength, is only to give consistency and permanence to an influence more compendious than persuasion.
William Godwin
The most desirable mode of education. . . . is that which is careful that all the acquisitions of the pupil shall be preceded and accompanied by desire . . . The boy, like the man, studies because he desires it. He proceeds upon a plan of is own invention, or by which, by adopting, he has made his own. Everything bespeaks independence and inequality.
William Godwin
The true object of moral and political disquisition is pleasure or happiness. The primary, or earliest, class of human pleasure is the pleasures of external senses. In addition to these, man is susceptible of certain secondary pleasures, as the pleasures of intellectual feeling, the pleasures of sympathy, and the pleasures of self-approbation. The secondary pleasures are probably more exquisite than the primary; Or, at least, The most desirable state of man is that in which he has access to all these sources of pleasure, and is in possession of a happiness the most varied and uninterrupted. This state is a state of high civilization.
William Godwin
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