William Godwin Quotes

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

A new civilization was not to be improvised by a single mind.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.

If someone feels negative about the way society or culture seems to be going, what it probably suggests is that it's just moving away from the state that they are comfortable with or used to. It's understandable why someone would feel that way.

'Aquarian Conspiracy' is the term I have coined for the network of people working for social transformation based on personal inner change. Such a notion is not at all alien to the American milieu.

I appreciate the change associated with people's growth, but I don't like the changes in our lives. I came to Mumbai in 1945, so imagine my acceptance of the massive changes around. I have witnessed every kind of revolution.

From the coffee bars of Camden to the gin joints of Norfolk - across Britain, a revolution is brewing. And no, it's not John McDonnell's bitter socialist hooch. It's a generation growing up with an entirely different view of the world - free thinking, optimistic and hungry for success.

I think, with TG, in our own ways, we have been committed to the idea of evolution on some level and change on some level - that human behaviour may not be changeable, but one has to try and be optimistic and work towards content that might signify change.

I want to talk about the nature of human beings or how we're evolving as a race.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

I suspect that many of the great cultural shifts that prepare the way for political change are largely aesthetic.

The only way to get change is not through the courts or - heaven forbid - the politicians, but through a change of human consciousness and through a change of heart. Only through the arts - music, poetry, dance, painting, writing - "can we really reach each other.

Because many advances have happened, we've lost the urgency (and that's just human nature) that we had before, when we couldn't vote, couldn't use mass transportation, or drink from the fountains.

Perhaps we are wiser, less foolish and more far-seeing than we were two hundred years ago. But we are still imperfect in all these things, and since the turn of the century it has been remarked that neither wisdom nor virtue have increased as rapidly as the need for both.

Those cultural wars, Sexual Revolution issues are fading from the scene, and the coming generation has basically settled them.

We cannot handle injustice by finding more ways to impose what is in fact "right" on people. It has to come from the inside. And that's where the church should be working.

But a law, however venerable be the sanction, cannot suddenly transform the temper of the times . . .

I think people look at revolution too much in terms of power. I think revolution has to be seen more anthropologically, in terms of transitions from one mode of life to another.

Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poeticyouth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.

A tree lives on its roots. If you change the root, you change the tree. Culture lives in human beings. If you change the human heart the culture will follow.

The minority of one generation is usually the majority of the next.

Revolution is not something outside of us, but inside us, begging for our engagement every single day.

The heterodoxy of one generation is the orthodoxy of the next.

With highly civilised nations continued progress depends in a subordinate degree on natural selection; for such nations do not supplant and exterminate one another as do savage tribes.