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Man is the only creature we know, that, when the term of his natural life is ended, leaves the memory of himself behind him.
William Godwin
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William Godwin
Age: 80 †
Born: 1756
Born: March 3
Died: 1836
Died: April 7
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Political Philosopher
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Wisbech
Cambridgeshire
Creatures
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Behind
Memories
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Creature
Natural
Ended
Men
Leaves
Life
Memory
More quotes by William Godwin
Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.
William Godwin
It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn. The true object of juvenile education, is to provide, against the age of five and twenty, a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn. Whatever will inspire habits of industry and observation, will sufficiently answer this purpose.
William Godwin
Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbours. This right flows from the very nature of man.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference.
William Godwin
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
Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.
William Godwin
Revolutions are the produce of passion, not of sober and tranquil reason.
William Godwin
Learning is the ally, not the adversary of genius... he who reads in a proper spirit, can scarcely read too much.
William Godwin
The virtue of a human being is the application of his capacity to the general good.
William Godwin
The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
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. The first of these a just philosophy will probably induce us universally to explode.
William Godwin
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.
William Godwin
Whenever truth stands in the mind unaccompanied by the evidence upon which it depends, it cannot properly be said to be apprehended at all.
William Godwin
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
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
God himself has no right to be a tyrant.
William Godwin
To conceive that compulsion and punishment are the proper means of reformation is the sentiment of a barbarian.
William Godwin
Revolution is engendered by an indignation with tyranny, yet is itself pregnant with tyranny.... An attempt to scrutinize men's thoughts and punish their opinions is of all kinds of despotism the most odious: yet this is peculiarly character of a period of revolution.... There is no period more at war with the existence of liberty.
William Godwin
