Life & Wisdom Quote by William Godwin

A single word does most of the work here: “duty.” Godwin isn’t praising a warm, fuzzy patriotism; he’s pointing to an ethic that turns private life into public property. “They held it” suggests a chosen creed, almost a self-imposed law, but the sentence’s real chill comes from “but.” Not “also” or “especially” - “but.” No remainder. The phrase compresses a whole moral economy in which the individual’s desires, family ties, and even survival are subordinate to an abstraction called “their country.”

That compression matters because Godwin, the radical political philosopher behind Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, spent much of his career interrogating precisely this kind of moral blackmail: the way institutions recruit noble language to secure obedience. Read through that lens, the line feels less like recruitment copy and more like a diagnosis of how nations manufacture virtue. “Their country” isn’t “humanity,” “justice,” or even “neighbors”; it’s a bounded collective that can ask for everything while claiming to represent the highest good.

The subtext is about permission structures. Once citizens accept that living is a duty owed upward to the state, sacrifice stops being exceptional and becomes expected. The sentence is elegantly ambiguous: it can sound like admiration for republican selflessness, yet it also lays bare the danger - the ease with which “duty” can become a clean moral alibi for coercion, war, and the steady shrinking of the self.