Уильям Годвин цитаты страница 2

„Невидимое есть единственная реальность.“

„Самое важное свойство для физического здоровья представляет бодрость духа. Упадок духа сродни смерти.“

„Самое великое из всех благ, — по крайней мере то, без которого нельзя пользоваться другими, — это независимость.“

“Truth is powerful, and, if not instantly, at least by slow degrees, may make good her possession. Gleams of good sense may penetrate through the thickest clouds of error. But we are supposing in the present case that truth is the object of the preceptor. Upon that assumption it would be strange indeed, if he were not able to triumph over corruption and sophistry, with the advantage of being continually at hand, of watching every change and symptom as they may arise, and more especially with the advantage of real voice, of accommodated eloquence, and of living sympathies, over a dead letter. These advantages are sufficient; and, as the true object of education is not to render the pupil the mere copy of his preceptor, it is rather to be rejoiced in, than lamented, that various reading should lead him into new trains of thinking; open to him new mines of science and new incentives to virtue; and perhaps, by a blended and compound effect, produce in him an improvement which was out of the limits of his lessons, and raise him to heights the preceptor never knew.”

Уильям Годвин: Цитаты на английском языке

“Nothing can be of more importance than to separate prejudice and mistake on the one hand from reason and demonstration on the other.”

The Enquirer : Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (1797), Essay XV : Of Choice In Reading, p. 130, (1823 edition)

“Democracy is a system of government according to which every member of society is considered as a man and nothing more.”

Book III, Ch.1
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

“Ministers and favorites are a sort of people who have a state prisoner in their custody, the whole management of whose understanding and actions they can easily engross.”

Book V, Chapter 13, "General Features of Democracy"

Massacre is the too possible attendant upon revolution , and massacre is perhaps the most hateful scene, alllowing for its omentary duration, that any imagination can suggest, The fearful, hopeless, expectation of the defeated, and the blood-hound fury of their conquerors, is a complication of mischief that all which has been told of internal regions can scarcely surpass. The cold-blooded massacres that are perpetrated under the naem of criminal justice fall short of these in some of their most frightful aggravations. The ministers and instruments of law have by perform, and often bear their parts in the most shocking enormities without being sensible to the passions allied murders with the rudeness of an insulting triumph ; and, as the conduct themselves , in a certain sort, by known principles of injustice, the evil we have reason to apprehend has its limits. But the instruments of massacre are discharged from every restraint.

Book VIII, Ch.
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

“The benefit of the governed is made to lie on one side and the benefit of the governors on the other.”

Book V, Ch. 5
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)

“Duty is that mode of action which constitutes the best application of the capacity of the individual to the general advantage. Right is the claim of the individual to his share of the benefit arising from his neighbors' discharge of their several duties.”

Book III, Chapter 9
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793)