...the law has neither eyes, nor ears, nor bowels of humanity; and it turns into marble the hearts of all those that are nursed in its principles. - William Godwin

Government was intended to suppress injustice, but its effect has been to embody and perpetuate it.

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.

The reason a man lives under any particular government is partly a necessity; he cannot easily avoid living under some government, and it is often scarcely in his power to abandon the country in which he was born: it is also partly, a choice of evil; no man can be said, in this case, to enjoy that freedom which is essential to the forming a contract unless it could be shown that he had a power of instituting, somewhere, a government adapted to his own conceptions.