William Godwin Quotes
What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child?
William Godwin
(Thoughts on Man: His Nature, Productions, and Discoveries, 1831)
Justice is the sum of all moral duty.
He that loves reading has everything within his reach.
Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.
The lessons of their early youth regulated the conduct of their riper years.
The interests of the human species require a gradual, but uninterrupted change.
Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.
Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.
If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.
Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.
The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children.
Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.
Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.
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.
Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.
He that loves reading has everything within his reach. He has but to desire, and he may possess himself of every species of wisdom to judge and power to perform.
As the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking.
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.
If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak.
The proper method for hastening the decay of error is not by brute force, or by regulation which is one of the classes of force, to endeavour to reduce men to intellectual uniformity; but on the contrary by teaching every man to think for himself.
In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions without attaining some resemblance to them.
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.
As long as parents and teachers in general shall fall under the established rule, it is clear that politics and modes of government will educate and infect us all. They poison our minds, before we can resist, or so much as suspect their malignity. Like the barbarous directors of the Eastern seraglios, they deprive us of our vitality, and fit us for their despicable employment from the cradle.
He who should make these principles would not rashly insist upon instant abolition of all existing abuses . . . . Truth, however unreserved by the mode of its enunciation, will be sufficiently gradual in is progress. It will be fully comprehended only be slow degrees, by its most assiduous votaries; and the degrees will be still more temperate by which it will pervade so considerable a portion of the community as to render them mature for a change of their common institutions . . . we shall have many reforms, but no revolutions . . . . Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.
Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I be never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!
