William Godwin Quotes

The usual cause of evil in the world is that at any given time half the people in the world are awake.

As soon as man enters into a state of society he loses the sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then commences the state of war.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

Drama lives on conflict. If you're trying to deal with social issues seriously, there's no way of avoiding violence, which is so present in society.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

Too often, systems of oppression turn those who are the targets of the oppression against one another.

Man has set man against man, Washed against unwashed.

The weak are always at war with the stronger; that is the source of eternal hatreds.

It is as much in the order of nature that men should enslave each other as that animals should prey upon each other.

All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.

The history of all hither-to-existing society is the history of class struggles.

The quest for some unmistakable proof of superior status and identity replaces the ideal of success for many .... the history of modernization is largely one of carnage and bedlam rather than peaceful convergence.

Disrespect is the weapon of the weak

I travel around the world, experiencing every language, every religion... some places where there's just no reason to smile, because their lives are so difficult.

Every man is dishonest who lives upon the labor of others, no matter if he occupies a throne.

The individual mirrors in his individuation the preordained social laws of exploitation, however mediated.

Simple peck-order bullying is only the beginning of the kind of hierarchical behavior that can lead to racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, and all the other 'isms' that cause so much suffering in the world.

Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have the exact measure of the injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them.

From a young age, I was rubbing elbows with a very different kind of person and social class, and I felt a lot of tension and conflict in my identity because of that.

History shows that where ethics and economics come in conflict, victory is always with economics. Vested interests have never been known to have willingly divested themselves unless there was sufficient force to compel them.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

Humans are insane. We kill our own people, starve our own people, sell them, work them to death, beat them, don't give them affordable/free/good healthcare, and let them live in misery, while a few of us have - we have all we want. We are evil.

The world is not fair, and often fools, cowards, liars and the selfish hide in high places.

Under adversity, under oppression, the words begin to fail, the easy words begin to fail. In order to convey things accurately, the human being is almost forced to find the most precise words possible, which is a precondition for literature.

Subordination tends greatly to human happiness. Were we all upon an equality, we should have no other enjoyment than mere animal pleasure.