Date: 1789

"You stupify them with stripes, and think it necessary to keep them in a state of ignorance; and yet you assert that they are incapable of learning; that their minds are such a barren soil or moor, that culture would be lost on them; and that they come from a climate, where nature, though prodiga...

— Equiano, Olaudah [Gustavus Vasa] (c. 1745-1797)

Date: w. January 24, 1789

"Your dear idea reigns, and reigns alone; / Each thought intoxicated homage yields, / And riots wanton in forbidden fields."

— Burns, Robert (1759-1796)

Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827

"When I came home; on the abyss of the five senses, where a flat sided steep frowns over the present world. I saw a mighty Devil folded in black clouds, hovering on the sides of the rock, with corroding fires he wrote the following sentence now percieved by the minds of men, & read by them on earth"

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1790, 1794, 1795, 1818, 1827

"For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern."

— Blake, William (1757-1827)

Date: 1790

"This sort of people are so taken up with their theories about the rights of man, that they have totally forgot his nature. Without opening one new avenue to the understanding, they have succeeded in stopping up those that lead to the heart."

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1790

"But those who will stand upon that elevation of reason, which places centuries under our eye, and brings things to the true point of comparison, which obscures little names, and effaces the colours of little parties, and to which nothing can ascend but the spirit and moral quality of human actio...

— Burke, Edmund (1729-1797)

Date: 1791

"Dr. Goldsmith once said to Dr. Johnson, that he wished for some additional members to the LITERARY CLUB, to give it an agreeable variety; for (said he) there can now be nothing new among us: we have travelled over one another's minds."

— Boswell, James (1740-1795)

Date: 1792

"But souls in common are a dreary waste, / By brambles, thistles, barb'rous docks disgrac'd; / That need the ploughshare, harrow, and the fire--"

— Wolcot, John, pseud. Peter Pindar, (1738-1819)

Date: 1793

Corporal punishment closes all "wholsome avenues of mind ... and on every side we see them guarded with a train of disgraceful passions, hatred, revenge, despotism, cruelty, hypocrisy, conspiracy and cowardice."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"Milton had perhaps wandered in the fields of fancy, and consoled his blindness with listening to the voice of his nation, that was to have resounded with his name."

— Disraeli, Isaac (1766-1848)