Quotes from William Godwin

There is reverence that we owe to everything in human shape.

If a thing be really good, it can be shown to be such.

Justice is the sum of all moral duty.

It is necessary for him who would endure existence with patience that he should conceive himself to be something - that he should be persuaded he is not a cipher in the muster-roll of man.

Men who do not contend in earnest can have little warmth and fervor in what they undertake, and are more than half prepared to betray the cause, in the vindication of which they have engaged their services.

While my mother lived, I always felt to a certain degree as if I had somebody who was my superior and who exercised a mysterious protection over me. I belonged to something - I hung to something - there is nothing that has so much reverence and religion in it as affection to parents.

The real or supposed rights of man are of two kinds, active and passive; the right in certain cases to do as we list; and the right we possess to the forbearance or assistance of other men.

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

One of the prerogatives by which man is eminently distinguished from all other living beings inhabiting this globe of earth, consists in the gift of reason.

The philosophy of the wisest man that ever existed, is mainly derived from the act of introspection.

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.

Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.

There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is not imagination.

Government will not fail to employ education, to strengthen its hands, and perpetuate its institutions.

My thoughts will be taken up with the future or the past, with what is to come or what has been. Of the present there is necessarily no image.

Let us not, in the eagerness of our haste to educate, forget all the ends of education.

Above all we should not forget that government is an evil, a usurpation upon the private judgement and individual conscience of mankind.

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.

We are so curiously made that one atom put in the wrong place in our original structure will often make us unhappy for life.

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.

To dragoon man into the adoption of what we think right, is an intolerable tyranny.

It is absurd to expect the inclinations and wishes of two human beings to coincide, through any long period of time. To oblige them to act and live together is to subject them to some inevitable potion of thwarting, bickering, and unhappiness.

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.

Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.