Life & Wisdom Quote by William Godwin

Godwin’s line is a clean, double-edged scalpel: revolution begins as moral revulsion, then risks becoming the very sickness it set out to cure. The verb choices do the heavy lifting. “Engendered” gives revolution a biological origin story - not a lofty manifesto but an almost involuntary conception sparked by “indignation,” that combustible emotion that makes political restraint feel like complicity. Then comes the pivot: “pregnant with tyranny.” He doesn’t say revolution might lead to tyranny; he says it already contains it, like a hidden inheritance.

The subtext is a warning to anyone drunk on righteous upheaval: the emotional fuel that topples a despot can just as easily justify new coercion once the old order collapses. Indignation is selective; it sharpens the eye for the regime’s cruelty while blurring the revolution’s own appetite for emergency powers, purges, and “temporary” exceptions. Godwin is describing a psychological mechanism as much as a political one: people who have suffered humiliation are primed to sanctify force when it’s wielded in the name of liberation.

Context matters. Writing in the shadow of the French Revolution and its slide from high-minded liberation into the Terror, Godwin - a radical sympathetic to reform - was also an early diagnostician of how revolutions centralize authority under the pressure of chaos. The sentence works because it refuses the comforting narrative arc of progress. It’s not anti-change; it’s anti-innocence. Godwin’s real target is the romance of revolution: the belief that virtue automatically follows violence if the cause is just.