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.

— William Godwin

Religion is among the most beautiful and most natural of all things - that religion which 'sees God in clouds and hears Him in the wind,' which endows every object of sense with a living soul, which finds in the system of nature whatever is holy, mysterious and venerable, and inspires the bosom with sentiments of awe and veneration.

— William Godwin

Strange that men, from age to age, should consent to hold their lives at the breath of another, merely that each in his turn may have a power of acting the tyrant according to the law! Oh, God! Give me poverty! Shower upon me all the imaginary hardships of human life! I will receive them with all thankfulness. Turn me a prey to the wild beasts of the desert, so I am never again the victim of man, dressed in the gore-dripping robes of authority! Suffer me at least to call life, the pursuits of life, my own! Let me hold it at the mercy of the elements, of the hunger of the beasts, or the revenge of barbarians, but not of the cold-blooded prudence of monopolists and kings!

— William Godwin

Superior virtue must be the fruit of superior intelligence.

— William Godwin

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.

— William Godwin

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

— William Godwin

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

— William Godwin

There can be no passion, and by consequence no love, where there is no imagination.

— William Godwin

There is nothing that human imagination can figure brilliant and enviable that human genius and skill do not aspire to realize.

— William Godwin

There must be room for the imagination to exercise its powers we must conceive and apprehend a thousand things which we do not actually witness.

— William Godwin