Quotes from William Godwin

A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.

Invisible things are the only realities; invisible things alone are the things that shall remain.

What power there is in the word my.

if admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be an universal problem.

Nothing could've been more easy to predict, than that it was of no avail for him to have right on his side when his adversary had influence and wealth, and therefore could so victoriously justify any extravagancies that he might think proper to commit. This maxim was completely illustrated in the sequel. Wealth and despotism easily know how to engage those laws as coadjutors of their oppression, which were perhaps at first intended for the safeguards of the poor.

Till we come to try to put our own thoughts upon paper, we can have no notion how broke and imperfect they are, or find where the imperfection lies. Language is a scheme of machinery of so subtle a kind, that it is only by long habits that we can learn to conduct it in a masterly manner, or to the best purposes.

To do what is forbidden always has its charms, because we have an indistinct apprehension of something arbitrary and tyrannical in the prohibition.

the law has neither eyes, nor ears, nor bowels of humanity; and it turns into marble the hearts of all those that are nursed in its principles.

Sure I arn't a cabbage, that if you pull it out of the ground it must die.

In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights, of a mind of uncommon excellence.

As we brew, we must bake

Pride always wants a little smarting.

But the world is all alike. Those that seem better than their neighbours, are only more artful.

Why did she thus obstinately cling to an ill-starred, unhappy person?

There is but one power to which I can yield a heart felt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictate of my own conscience

a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors, as if it were the nature of the mind always too degenerate and never to advance.

What can be more clear and sound in explanation, than the love of a parent to his child?

No man must think that the world was made for him.

But there are certain disadvantages that may seem the necessary result of democratical equality. In political society it is reasonable to suppose that the wise will be outnumbered by the unwise, and it will be inferred 'that the welfare of the whole will therefore be at the mercy of ignorance and folly.

God himself has no right to be a tyrant.

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

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

Government can have no more than two legitimate purposes - the suppression of injustice against individuals within the community, and the common defense against external invasion.

Power is not happiness.