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William Godwin

44 quotes

“I am myself deeply convinced that imagination is the basis of a sound reason. It is by dint of feeling, and of putting ourselves in fancy into the place of other men, that we can learn how we ought to treat them, and be moved to treat them as we ought. Man, to express the thing in familiar language, is a complex being, made up of a head and a heart. So far as we are employed in heaping up facts and in reasoning upon them merely, we are a species of machine; it is our impulses and our sentiments, that are the glory of our nature.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) first seen 1818 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Of Religion" (1818), quoted in Political and Philosophical Writings of William Godwin, Volume 7: Religious Writings, ed. Mark Philp (2016)
“You rejoice in having made a convert to Atheism. I think there is something unnatural in a zeal of proselytism in an Atheist. I do not believe in an intellectual God, a God made after the image of man. In the vulgar acceptation of the word, therefore, I think a man is right who does not believe in God, but I am also persuaded that a man is wrong who is without religion.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) first seen 1820 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to H. B. Rosser (7 March 1820), quoted in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. II (1876), p. 263
“I took some pains to convince you that the Whigs, as a party in the state, were of the highest value to the public welfare, and constituted the party to which a liberal-minded and enlightened man would adhere.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) first seen 1820 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to H. B. Rosser (7 March 1820), quoted in C. Kegan Paul, William Godwin: His Friends and Contemporaries, Vol. II (1876), p. 263
“It is comparatively easy for the philosopher in his closet to invent imaginary schemes of policy, and to shew how mankind, if they were without passions and without prejudices, might best be united in the form of a political community. But, unfortunately, men in all ages are the creatures of passions, perpetually prompting them to defy the rein, and break loose from the dictates of sobriety and speculation.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) first seen 1828 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: History of the Commonwealth of England. From its Commencement, to the Restoration of Charles the Second. Volume the Fourth. Oliver, Lord Protector (1828), p. 579
“The first authentic record on this subject (alchemy) is an edict of Diocletian, about 300 years after Christ, ordering a diligent search to be made in Egypt for all the ancient books which treated of the art of making gold and silver, that they might be consigned to the flames. This edict necessarily presumes a certain antiquity to the pursuit; and fabulous history has recorded Solomon, Pythagoras, and Hermes among its distinguished votaries.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Quoted by H.P. Blavatsky, in Isis Unveiled: A Master-Key to the Mysteries of Ancient and Modern Science and Theology, Vol. I, (1877) (p. 504)
“Government was intended to suppress injustice, but it offers new occasions and temptations for the commission of it.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pleasures of self-approbation, together with the right cultivation of all our pleasures, require individual independence. Without independence men cannot become either wise, or useful, or happy.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage. Right is the claim of the individual to his share of the benefit arising from his neighbors' discharge of their several duties.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Perfectibility is one of the most unequivocal characteristics of the human species.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Men may one day feel that they are partakers of a common nature, and that true freedom and perfect equity, like food and air, are pregnant with benefit to every constitution.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“If there be such a thing as truth, it must infallibly be struck out by the collision of mind with mind.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“No man must encroach upon my province nor I upon his. He may advise me, moderately and without perniciousness, but he must not expect to dictate to me. He may censure me freely and without reserve but he should remember that I am to act by my deliberation and not his. He may exercise a republican boldness in judging, but he must not be peremptory and imperious in prescribing. Force may never be resorted to but, in the most extraordinary and imperious emergency.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The political freedom of conscience and of the press, so far from being as it is commonly supposed an extension, is a new case of the limitation of rights and discretion. Conscience and the press ought to be unrestrained, not because men have a right to deviate from the exact line that duty prescribes, but because society, the aggregate of individuals, has no right to assume the prerogative of an infallible judge, and to undertake authoritatively to prescribe to its members in matters of pure speculation.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) first seen 1797 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Vol. 1, bk 2 : Principles of Society , Ch. 5 : Of Rights (1797 edition)
“Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation, is the sentiment of a barbarian; civilisation and science are calculated to explode so ferocious an idea. It was once universally admitted and approved; it is now necessarily upon the decline.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“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.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The reason a man lives under any particular government is partly a necessity; he cannot easily avoid living under some government, and it is often scarcely in his power to abandon the country in which he was born: it is also partly, a choice of evil; no man can be said, in this case, to enjoy that freedom which is essential to the forming a contract unless it could be shown that he had a power of instituting, somewhere, a government adapted to his own conceptions.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Government in reality, as has abundantly appeared, is a question of force, and not of consent. It is desirable that a government should be made as agreeable as possible to the ideas and inclinations of its subjects and that they should be consulted, as extensively as may be, respecting its construction and regulations. But, at last, the best constituted government that can be formed particularly for a large community, will contain many provisions that, far from having obtained the consent of all its members, encounter even in their outset a strenuous, thought ineffectual opposition.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“A common mortal periodically selected by his fellow-citizens to watch over their own interests, can never be supposed to possess this stupendous virtue.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The benefit of the governed is made to lie on one side and the benefit of the governors on the other.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The pistol and dagger may as easily be made the auxiliaries of vice, as of virtue.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The plebeian must expect to find himself neglected and despised in proportion as he is remiss in cultivation the objects of esteem; the lord will always be surrounded with sycophants and slaves. The lord therefore has no motive to industry and exertion; no stimulus to rouse him from the lethargic 'oblivious pool', out of which every human intellect originally arose.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The man that does not know himself not to be at the mercy of other men, that does not feel that he is invulnerable to all the vicissitudes of fortune, is incapable of a constant and inflexible virtue.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ministers and favorites are a sort of people who have a state prisoner in their custody, the whole management of whose understanding and actions they can easily engross.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Ministers become a sort of miniature kings in their turn. Though they have the greatest opportunity of observing the impotence and unmeaningness of the character, they envy it. It is their trade perpetually to extol the dignity and importance of the master they serve; and men cannot long anxiously endeavor to convince others of the truth of any proposition without becoming half convinced themselves.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“It is false that kings are entitled to the eminence they obtain. They possess no intrinsic superiority over their subjects. The line of distinction that is drawn is the offspring of pretense, an indirect means employed for effecting certain purposes, and not the language of truth. It tramples upon the genuine nature of things, and depends for its support upon this argument, 'that, were it not for impositions of a similar nature, mankind would be miserable.'”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Mankind will never be, in an eminent degree, virtuous and happy till each man shall possess that portion of distinction and no more, to which he is entitled by his personal merits. The dissolution of aristocracy is equally the interest of the oppressor and the oppressed. The one will be delivered from the listlessness of tyranny, and the other from the brutalizing operation of servitude.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The case of mere titles is so absurd that it would deserve to be treated only with ridicule were t not for the serious mischief they impose on mankind. The feudal system was a ferocious monster, devouring, where it came, all that the friend of humanity regards with attachment and love. The system of titles appears under a different form. The monster is at length destroyed, and they who followed in his train, and fattened upon the carcasses of those he slew, have stuffed his skin, and, b exhibiting it, hope still to terrify mankind into patient and pusillanimity.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Till mankind be satisfied with the naked statement of what they really perceive, till they confess virtue to be then most illustrious, when she more disdains the aid of ornament, they will never arrive at that manly justice of sentiment at which they seem destined one day to arrive. By his scheme of naked virtue will be every day a gainer; every succeeding observer willl more fully do her justice, while vice, deprived of that varnish with which she delighted to glow her actions of that gaudy exhibition which may be made alike by every pretender will speedily sink into unheeded contempt.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Democracy is a system of government according to which every member of society is considered as a man and nothing more.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Anarchy, in its own nature, is an evil of short duration. The more horrible are the mischiefs it inflicts, the more does it hasten to a close.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Nothing can be of more importance than to separate prejudice and mistake on the one hand from reason and demonstration on the other.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Simplify the social system, in the manner which every motive, but those of usurpation and ambition, powerfully recommends; render the plain dictates of justice level to every capacity; remove the necessity of implicit faith; and we may expect the whole species to become reasonable and virtuous.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Portable Enlightenment Reader, p. 478-479”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Truth is powerful, and, if not instantly, at least by slow degrees, may make good her possession. Gleams of good sense may penetrate through the thickest clouds of error. But we are supposing in the present case that truth is the object of the preceptor. Upon that assumption it would be strange indeed, if he were not able to triumph over corruption and sophistry, with the advantage of being continually at hand, of watching every change and symptom as they may arise, and more especially with the advantage of real voice, of accommodated eloquence, and of living sympathies, over a dead letter. These advantages are sufficient; and, 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; open to him new mines of science and new incentives to virtue; and perhaps, by a blended and compound effect, produce in him an improvement which was out of the limits of his lessons, and raise him to heights the preceptor never knew.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) first seen 1797 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Enquirer : Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797), Essay XV : Of Choice In Reading, p. 130, (1823 edition)
“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. The lawyer never yet existed who has not boldly urged an objection which he knew to be fallacious, or endeavoured to pass off a weak reason for a strong one. Intellect is the greatest and most sacred of all endowments; and no man ever trifled with it, defending an action to-day which he had arraigned yesterday, or extenuating an offence on one occasion, which, soon after, he painted in the most atrocious colours, with absolute impunity. 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 (1756–1836) first seen 1803 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: The Life of Geoffrey Chaucer vol. 1, p. 370 (1803)
“One principle, that I believe is wanting in you, and all our too fervent and impetuous reformers, is the thought, that almost every institution or form of society is good in its place, and in the period of time to which it belongs. How many beautiful and admirable effects grew out of Popery and the monastic institutions, in the period, when they were in their genuine health and vigour! To them we owe almost all our logic and our literature. What excellent effects do we reap, even at this day, from the feudal system and from chivalry! In this point of view, nothing can, perhaps, be more worthy of our applause than the English constitution.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) first seen 1812 wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
Recorded in: Letter to Percy Bysshe Shelley (4 March 1812), quoted in Thomas Jefferson Hogg, The Life of Percy Bysshe Shelley, Vol. II (1858), p. 86
“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 (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The illustrious archbishop of Cambray was of more worth than his chambermaid, and there are few of us that would hesitate to pronounce, if his palace were in flames, and the life of only one of them could be preserved, which of the two ought to be preferred … Supposing the chambermaid had been my wife, my mother or my benefactor. This would not alter the truth of the proposition. The life of Fenelon would still be more valuable than that of the chambermaid; and justice, pure, unadulterated justice, would still have preferred that which was most valuable. Justice would have taught me to save the life of Fenelon at the expence of the other. What magic is there in the pronoun "my", to overturn the decisions of everlasting truth?”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Let us here return to the sublime conjecture of Franklin, that “mind will one day become omnipotent over matter.” If over all other matter, why not over the matter of our own bodies? If over matter at ever so great a distance, why not over matter which, however ignorant we may be of the tie that connects it with the thinking principle, we always carry about with us, and which is in all cases the medium of communication between that principle and the external universe? In a word, why may not man be one day immortal? The different cases in which thought modifies the external universe are obvious to all. It is modified by our voluntary thoughts or design. We desire to stretch out our hand, and it is stretched out. We perform a thousand operations of the same species every day, and their familiarity annihilates the wonder. They are not in themselves less wonderful than any of those modifications which we are least accustomed to conceive. — Mind modifies body involuntarily.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“Privilege is a regulation rendering a few men, and those only, by the accident of their birth, eligible to certain situations. It kills all liberal ambition in the rest of mankind, by opposing to it an apparently insurmountable bar. It diminishes it in the favored class itself, by showing them the principal qualification as indefeasibly theirs. Privilege entitles a favored few to engross to themselves gratifications which the system of the universe left at large to all her sons; it puts into the hands of those few the means of oppression against the rest of their species; it fill them witth vain-glory, and affords them every incitement to insolence and a lofty disregard to the feeling and interests of others.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“The evil of marriage, as is it practiced in the European countries, extends further than we have yet described. The method is for a thoughtless and romantic youth of each sex, to come together, to see each other, for a few times, and under circumstances full of delusion and then to vow eternal attachment. What is the consequence of this? In almost every instance they find themselves deceived. They are reduced to make the best of an irretrievable mistake. They are led to conceive it their wiser policy, to shut their eyes upon realities, happy, if by any perversion of intellect, they can persuade themselves that they were right in their first crude opinion of each other. Thus the institution of marriage is made a system of fraud; and men who carefully mislead their judgement in the daily affair of their life, must be expected to have a crippled judgement in every other concern.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source
“I did not hate the author of my misfortunes — truth and justice acquit me of that; I rather pitied the hard destiny to which he seemed condemned. But I thought with unspeakable loathing of those errors, in consequence of which every man is fated to be, more or less, the tyrant or the slave. I was astonished at the folly of my species, that they did not rise up as one man, and shake off chains so ignominious, and misery so insupportable. So far as related to myself, I resolved — and this resolution has never been entirety forgotten by me — to hold myself disengaged from this odious scene, and never fill the part either of the oppressor or the sufferer.”
William Godwin (1756–1836) said by 1836 at the latest wikiquote, CC BY-SA 4.0 source