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" Sympathy is one of the principles most widely rooted in our nature: we rejoice to see ourselves reflected in another; and, perversely enough, we sometimes have a secret pleasure in seeing the sin which dwells in ourselves existing under a deformed and monstrous aspect in another. "

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" Government, as it was forced upon mankind by their vices, so has it commonly been the creature of their ignorance and mistake. "

William Godwin

Government

Vices

Mistake

" He has no right to his life when his duty calls him to resign it. Other men are bound... to deprive him of life or liberty, if that should appear in any case to be indispensably necessary to prevent a greater evil. "

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

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

" The four principal oral instructors to whom I feel my mind indebted for improvement were Joseph Fawcet, Thomas Holcroft, George Dyson, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. "

" The true key of the universe is love. "

" The value of a man is in his intrinsic qualities: in that of which power cannot strip him and which adverse fortune cannot take away. That for which he is indebted to circumstances is mere trapping and tinsel. "

" Everything in the world is conducted by gradual process. This seems to be the great principle of harmony in the universe. "

" But the watchful care of the parent is endless. The youth is never free from the danger of grating interference. "

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

" Extraordinary circumstances often bring along with them extraordinary strength. No man knows, till the experiment, what he is capable of effecting. "

William Godwin

Strength

Man

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

William Godwin

Educate

Haste

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

" The love of independence and dislike of unjust treatment is the source of a thousand virtues. "

" I am an enemy to revolutions. I abhor, both from temper and from the clearest judgment I am able to form, all violent convulsions in the affairs of men. "

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

" In the graver and more sentimental communication of man and man, the head still bears the superior sway; in the unreserved intimacies of man and woman, the heart is ever uppermost. Feeling is the main thing, and judgment passes for little. "

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

" 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. "

" The world is all alike. Those that seem better than their neighbours are only more artful. They mean the same thing, though they take a different road. "

" Soundness of understanding is connected with freedom of enquiry; consequently, opinion should, as far as public security will admit, be exempted from restraint. "

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

" 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. "

" A world of derived beings, an immense, wide creation, requires an extended scale with various ranks and orders of existence. "

" There are so many ways in which the heart of man conceals itself from man! "

" 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. "

William Godwin

Corrupt

Man

" The great model of the affection of love in human beings is the sentiment which subsists between parents and children. "

" We cannot, any of us, do all the things of which mankind stand in need; we must have fellow-labourers. "

William Godwin

Mankind

Stand

" The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself. "

William Godwin

Desires

Reason

" It is probable that there is no one thing that it is of eminent importance for a child to learn. "