Date: 1793

"All kings have possessed such a portion of luxury and ease, have been so far surrounded with servility and falshood, and to such a degree exempt from personal responsibility, as to destroy the natural and wholesome complexion of the human mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"In this unequal contest, alarm and apprehension will perpetually haunt the minds of those who exercise usurped power."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"If considerations of inferior note be apt to mislead the mind, what shall we think of this most intoxicating draught, of a condition superior to restraint, stripped of all those accidents and vicissitudes from which the morality of human beings has flowed, with no salutary check, with no intelle...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"The offspring of mind is daily sacrificed by hecatombs to the genius of monarchy."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"Mind is the creature of sensation; we have no other inlet of knowledge."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

In a just society "understanding would convert into a real power, no longer an ignis fatuus, shining and expiring by turns, and leading us into sloughs of sophistry, false science and specious mistake"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

The author can't understand an afterlife "where the mind, doomed to everlasting inactivity, shall be wholly a prey to the upbraidings of remorse and the sarcasms of devils, is so foreign to the system of things with which I am acquainted"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"Purify your mind from the gross ideas of sense, and elevate it to the single contemplation of that abstract individual of which particular men are so many detached members, valuable only for the place they fill"

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"The genuine and wholsome state of mind is, to be unloosed from shackles, and to expand every fibre of its frame according to the independent and individual impressions of truth upon that mind."

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)

Date: 1793

"It was from a view of this truth that the poets derived their fictions respecting the early history of mankind; well aware that, when luxury was introduced and the springs of mind unbent, it would be a vain expectation that should hope to recal men from passion to reason, and from effeminacy to ...

— Godwin, William (1756-1836)