Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness Quotes

“Whenever government assumes to deliver us from the trouble of thinking for ourselves, the only consequences it produces are those of torpor and imbecility.”
― William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness

“Add to this the species of government which prevails over nine tenths of the globe, which is despotism: a government, as Locke justly observes, altogether "vile and miserable," and "more to be deprecated than anarchy itself."(2*) Certainly every man who takes a dispassionate survey of this picture will feel himself inclined to pause respecting the necessity of the havoc which is thus made of his species, and to question whether the established methods for protecting mankind against the caprices of each other are the best that can be devised. He will be at a loss which of the two to pronounce most worthy of regret, the misery that is inflicted, or the depravity by which it is produced. If this be the unalterable allotment of our nature, the eminence of our rational faculties must be considered as rather an abortion than a substantial benefit; and we shall not fail to lament that, while in some respects we are elevated above the brutes, we are in so many important ones destined for ever to remain their inferiors.”
― William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness

“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 an universal problem.”
― William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness

“The only mode which is employed to repress this violence, and to maintain the order and peace of society, is punishment. Whips, axes and gibbets, dungeons, chains and racks are the most approved and established methods of persuading men to obedience, and impressing upon their minds the lessons of reason. There are few subjects upon which human ingenuity has been more fully displayed than in inventing instruments of torture. The lash of the whip a thousand times repeated and flagrant on the back of the defenceless victim, the bastinado on the soles of the feet, the dislocation of limbs, the fracture of bones, the faggot and the stake, the cross, impaling, and the mode of drifting pirates on the Volga, make but a small part of the catalogue. When Damiens, the maniac, was arraigned for his abortive attempt on the life of Louis XV of France, a council of anatomists was summoned to deliberate how a human being might be destroyed with the longest protracted and most diversified agony. Hundreds of victims are annually sacrificed at the shrine of positive law and political institution.”
― William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and Its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness

“But there are certain disadvantages that may seem the necessary result of democratical equality. In political society it is reasonable to suppose that the wise will be outnumbered by the unwise, and it will be inferred ‘that the welfare of the whole will therefore be at the mercy of ignorance and folly.”
― William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness

“...a timid reverence for the decisions of our ancestors, as if it were the nature of the mind always too degenerate and never to advance.”
― William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness

“There is but one power to which I can yield a heart felt obedience, the decision of my own understanding, the dictate of my own conscience”
― William Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice and Its Influence on Modern Morals and Happiness