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

Categorized in : Giving Government Consistency

No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has... by William Godwin

No man knows the value of innocence and integrity but he who has lost them.

value man innocence lost integrity

I believe in this being, not because I have any proper or direct knowledge of His existence, but I am at a loss to account for the existence and arrangement of the visible universe, and, being left in the wide sea of conjecture without a clue from analogy or experience, I find the conjecture of a God easy, obvious, and irresistible.

i-am god sea knowledge

How different a creature is man in society and man in solitude! by William Godwin

How different a creature is man in society and man in solitude!

man society solitude different

A just and a brave man acts fearlessly and with explicitness; he does not shun, but court, the scrutiny of mankind; he lives in the face of day, and the whole world confesses the clearness of his spirit and the rectitude of his conduct.

face day man brave

Innocence is not virtue. Virtue demands the active employment of an ardent mind in the promotion of the general good. No man can be eminently virtuous who is not accustomed to an extensive range of reflection.

good man reflection mind

Let no man despise the oracles of books! 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.

dead books man book

When the calamity we feared is already arrived, or when the expectation of it is so certain as to shut out hope, there seems to be a principle within us by which we look with misanthropic composure on the state to which we are reduced, and the heart sullenly contracts and accommodates itself to what it most abhorred.

expectation look hope heart

Give energy, and mental exertion will always have attraction enou... by William Godwin

Give energy, and mental exertion will always have attraction enough.

will always energy enough

Human creatures, living in the circle of their intimates and friends, are too apt to remain in ignorance of the comments and instructions which may be made of what they say and do in the world at large. I entertain a great horror of this ignorance.

great friends ignorance world

England has been called, with great felicity of conception, 'the land of liberty and good sense.' We have preserved many of the advantages of a free people, which the nations of the Continent have long since lost.

great good long people

The most desirable state of mankind is that which maintains general security with the smallest encroachment upon individual independence.

most security independence individual

The extent of our progress in the cultivation of knowledge is unl... by William Godwin

The extent of our progress in the cultivation of knowledge is unlimited.

our progress unlimited knowledge

Self-deception is so far from impossible that it is one of the most ordinary phenomena with which we are acquainted. Nothing is more usual than for a man to impute his actions to honorable motives when it is nearly demonstrable that they flowed from some corrupt and contemptible force.

nothing man force impossible

When we look on the roses and gaiety of youth, the mournful idea of mortality is altogether alien to our thoughts. We have heard of it as a speculation and a tale, but nothing but experience can bring it home to us.

thoughts youth experience home