'Byron had intoxicated him "with the freedom of his style of writing, with the fervour or passionateness of his feelings and with the dark and terrible pictures which he seemed to take pleasure in painting". The general effect of reading Milton, Hobbes, Locke and Newton had been "to make me resolve to be free. I saw that it was impossible for the soul of man to answer the end for which it was created, while tramelled by human authority, or fettered with human creeds. I saw that if I was to do justice to truth, to God, or to my own soul, I must break loose from all creeds and laws of men's devising, and live in full and unrestricted liberty..."'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Joseph Barker Print: Book
'[Jack Ashley] was less prepared for Ruskin [College] than most of the students, having read only two books since leaving school: Jack London's The Iron Heel and the regulations of the Widnes Town Council. But principal Lionel Elvin "appreciated the profound dificulties facing working class students": "When I stumbled through the intricacies of the political theories of Marx, Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke and T.H. Green, he marked my work frankly yet gave encouragement... He was an excellent teacher, genuinely interested in discussing ideas and persuading students to express their own"
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Jack Ashley Print: Book
[Marginalia]
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Taylor Coleridge Print: Book
'So to bed, with my mind cheery upon it; and lay long reading Hobbs his "liberty and necessity", and a little but a very shrewd piece.'
Century: 1600-1699 Reader/Listener/Group: Samuel Pepys Print: Book
'S. reads Hobbes. Ezechiel aloud'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'S. reads Hobbes'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
'Translate Sxxxxxa [Spinoza] with Shelley - Read Lettres Cabalistiques - S. finishes the Leviathan of Hobbes. reads the Bible aloud'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: Percy Bysshe Shelley Print: Book
[on the Apostles, Cambridge students' society to which Alfred Tennyson belonged]
'These friends not only debated on politics but read their Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Butler, Hume, Bentham, Descartes and Kant, and discussed such questions as the Origin of Evil, the Derivation of Moral Sentiments, Prayer and the Personality of God.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: The Apostles Print: Book
'Perpetually through my head, interfering with the detached contemplation of Hobbes's "Leviathan" and Mill on "Liberty", ran a sentence from one of the Elizabethan documents: "The Queen of Scots is the mother of a gallant son, but I am a barren stock."'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
'In "The Leviathan" of Thomas Hobbes, one of the seventeenth-century philosophers whom we had studied in our classes on Political Science, she found for her quotation page a passage which exactly fitted the theme:'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Winifred Holtby Print: Book
Sir William Molesworth to Harriet Grote, September 1838, regarding his planned edition of the
works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury:
'I have written this day to Mr. Grote, to ask permission to dedicate the volumes to him [...] I
shall ever feel the deepest gratitude for the philosophical instruction he gave me when I first
knew him, which induced me to study Hobbes and similar authors, and created a taste in my
mind for that style of reading.'
Century: 1800-1849 Reader/Listener/Group: William Molesworth Print: Book
'They could all, I thought, have been summed up by the glum description of barbarism in the book called "Leviathan" by the seventeenth-century philosopher, Thomas Hobbes.'
Century: 1900-1945 Reader/Listener/Group: Vera Brittain Print: Book
