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The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family QUOTES

The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family QUOTES

1 " [Edmund] Burke's predictions of the course of the French Revolution were to prove so accurate and have applied to so many other revolutions that they now constitute the general wisdom. It is however necessary to recall how shockingly cynical they seemed in 1790. "

― , The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family

2 " (On Godwin and the doctrine of the perfectibility of man): It was the former dissenting minister--brought up in one of the most joyless and hopeless views of man ever devised by a suffering people--who popularized the most confident and optimistic belief of the age of enlightenment. "

― , The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family

3 " (On Godwin's theories) Personal property is another of the institutions which distorts clear perception and distorts virtuous motive. The economic system, by reinforcing the more vicious aspects of human nature, greed, vanity, envy, and rivalry, inflicts moral damage on the minds both of the rich and the poor. A man who has a better claim to resources than I have has a right to demand them. If a beggar is starving and I have plenty of bread, I must give him some of mine. And there should be no question of requiring or offering gratitude, which is a disguised form of political dependence or deferred obligation. "

― , The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family

4 " For thirty years English literature clanks noisily with innumerable variations on the 'icy chains of custom,' and the 'chains off the mind' -- too often described as adamantine--become one of the clichés of the age. It was too easy to confuse the chains of causation with that other ancient metaphor, the 'Great Chain of Being,' which perceives the world as a hierarchy of all living things each linked into its proper place with man a rank below God, then the animals, fish, birds, and lesser organisms down to the pitiable insects and vegetables. This world view had traditionally been used to justify political and economic differences rather than to promote equality or liberty... "

― , The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family

5 " Southey gives a more down-to-earth description of what pantisocrats would actually do all day--they would discuss metaphysics while cutting down trees, criticize poetry while hunting buffaloes, and write sonnets while following the plough. The colonists intended that marriage would be abolished and the children brought up in common. This would not have involved sharing of wives but freedom to move from partner to partner according to their changing perceptions of each other's virtues. "

― , The Godwins and the Shelleys: A Biography of a Family