William Godwin: Quotes about men

William Godwin was English journalist, political philosopher and novelist. Explore interesting quotes on men.
William Godwin: 72   quotes 2   likes

“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

Vol. 1m bk. 1, ch. 3
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Men , Food , Feeling , Nature

“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

Vol. 2, bk. 8, ch. 6
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Men , Error , Thinking

“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

Principles of Society, The Rights of Man
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Men , Freedom

“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

Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Time , Country , Marriage , Fraud

“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

Book V, Chapter 11, "Moral Effects of Aristocracy"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Universe , Birth , Feeling , Men

“Ministers become a sort of miniature kings in their turn. Though they have the greatest opportunity o 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

Book V, Ch. 5
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Truth , Envy , Men

“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

Book V, "Of Education"
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Feeling , Men

“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

"Summary of Principles" 1.3
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

Pleasure , Self-confidence , Men , Happiness