Jeremy Bentham Quotes

#1. We may scatter the seeds of courtesy and kindness about us at little expense. Some of them will fall on good ground, and grow up into benevolence in the minds of others, and all of them will bear fruit of happiness in the bosom whence they spring.

Jeremy Bentham

#2. Right ... is the child of law.

Jeremy Bentham

#3. All punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil.

Jeremy Bentham

#4. The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

Jeremy Bentham

#5. Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity.

Jeremy Bentham

#6. In no instance has a system in regard to religion been ever established, but for the purpose, as well as with the effect of its being made an instrument of intimidation, corruption, and delusion, for the support of depredation and oppression in the hands of governments.

Jeremy Bentham

#7. Every law is an infraction of liberty.

Jeremy Bentham

#8. Without publicity, no good is permanent; under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.

Jeremy Bentham

#9. No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

Jeremy Bentham

#10. Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

Jeremy Bentham

#11. Kind words cost no more than unkind ones ... and we may scatter the seeds of courtesy and kindliness around us at so little expense. If you would fall into any extreme let it be on the side of gentleness. The human mind is so constructed that it resists vigor and yields to softness.

Jeremy Bentham

#12. The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.

Jeremy Bentham

#13. What is the source of this premature anxiety to establish fundamental laws? It is the old conceit of being wiser than all posterity - wiser than those who will have had more experience, - the old desire of ruling over posterity - the old recipe for enabling the dead to chain down the living

Jeremy Bentham

#14. Nonsense on stilts

Jeremy Bentham

#15. Among the several cloudy appellatives which have been commonly employed as cloaks for misgovernment, there is none more conspicuous in this atmosphere of illusion than the word Order.

Jeremy Bentham

#16. Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good.

Jeremy Bentham

#17. The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.

Jeremy Bentham

#18. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense - nonsense upon stilts.

Jeremy Bentham

#19. He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn.

Jeremy Bentham

#20. The rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

Jeremy Bentham

#21. The law of England has established trial by judge and jury in the conviction that it is the mode best calculated to ascertain the truth.

Jeremy Bentham

#22. Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.

Jeremy Bentham

#23. How is property given? By restraining liberty; that is, by taking it away so far as necessary for the purpose. How is your house made yours? By debarring every one else from the liberty of entering it without your leave.

Jeremy Bentham

#24. All government is a trust. Every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged to be so.

Jeremy Bentham

#25. Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.

Jeremy Bentham

#26. Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.

Jeremy Bentham

#27. There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.

Jeremy Bentham

#28. It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.

Jeremy Bentham

#29. Lawsuits generally originate with the obstinate and the ignorant, but they do not end with them; and that lawyer was right who left all his money to the support of an asylum for fools and lunatics, saying that from such he got it, and to such he would bequeath it.

Jeremy Bentham

#30. O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation

Jeremy Bentham

#31. The age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection.

Jeremy Bentham

#32. Those physical difficulties which you cannot account for, be very slow to arraign; for he that would be wiser than Nature would be wiser than God.

Jeremy Bentham

#33. It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.

Jeremy Bentham

#34. The addability of the happiness of different subjects is a postulum without which all political reasonings are at a stand

Jeremy Bentham

#35. Reputation is the road to power

Jeremy Bentham

#36. The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell.

Jeremy Bentham

#37. Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.

Jeremy Bentham

#38. Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you,
will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others,
or to diminish something of their pains.

Jeremy Bentham

#39. Unkind language is sure to produce the fruits of unkindness
that is, suffering in the bosom of others.

Jeremy Bentham

#40. As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.

Jeremy Bentham

#41. Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.

Jeremy Bentham

#42. Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.

Jeremy Bentham

#43. All poetry is misrepresentation.

Jeremy Bentham

#44. If Christianity needed an Anti-Christ, they needed look no farther than Paul.

Jeremy Bentham

#45. Lawyers sometimes tell the truth. They'll do anything to win a case.

Jeremy Bentham

#46. The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.

Jeremy Bentham

#47. The word "independence" is united to the accessory ideas of dignity and virtue. The word "dependence" is united to the ideas of inferiority and corruption.

Jeremy Bentham

#48. Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.

Jeremy Bentham

#49. The request of industry to government is as modest as that of Diogenes to Alexander: Get out of my light.

Jeremy Bentham

#50. The question is not, "Can they reason?" nor, "Can they talk?" but "Can they suffer?

Jeremy Bentham

#51. The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

Jeremy Bentham

#52. The quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.

Jeremy Bentham

#53. Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.

Jeremy Bentham

#54. The turn of a sentence has decided the fate of many a friendship, and, for aught that we know, the fate of many a kingdom.

Jeremy Bentham

#55. The question is not can animals speak but can they suffer.

Jeremy Bentham

#56. I don't care whether animals are capable of thinking; all I care about is that they are capable of suffering!

Jeremy Bentham