A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowered and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.

— William Godwin

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

— William Godwin

Every boy learns more in his hours of play than in his hours of labor. In school, he lays in the materials of thinking, but in his sports, he actually thinks: he whets his faculties, and he opens his eyes.

— William Godwin

Every man has a certain sphere of discretion which he has a right to expect shall not be infringed by his neighbors. This right flows from the very nature of man.

— William Godwin

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

— William Godwin

He that loves reading has everything within his reach.

— William Godwin

How are the faculties of man to be best developed and his happiness secured? The state of a king is not favorable to this, nor the state of the noble and rich men of the earth. All this is artificial life, the inventions of vanity and grasping ambition, by which we have spoiled the man of nature and of pure, simple, and undistorted impulses.

— William Godwin

I believe in this being, not because I have any proper or direct knowledge of His existence, but I am at a loss to account for the existence and arrangement of the visible universe, and, being left in the wide sea of conjecture without a clue from analogy or experience, I find the conjecture of a God easy, obvious, and irresistible.

— William Godwin

If admiration were not generally deemed the exclusive property of the rich, and contempt the constant lackey of poverty, the love of gain would cease to be a universal problem.

— William Godwin

If he who employs coercion against me could mold 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