Jeremy Bentham Quotes

The rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

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.

happy life and merciful death

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

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

What else is it that should trace the insuperable line? Is it the faculty of reason or perhaps the faculty of discourse? But a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as more conversable animal, than an infant of a day or a week or even a month old. But suppose they were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer? Why should the law refuse its protection to any sensitive being? The time will come when humanity will extend its mantle over everything which breathes ...

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Right ... is the child of law.

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

In the mind of all, fiction, in the logical sense, has been the coin of necessity; - in that of poets of amusement - in that of the priest and the lawyer of mischievous immorality in the shape of mischievous ambition, - and too often both priest and lawyer have framed or made in part this instrument.

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

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

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

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

Reputation is the road to power

Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure ... There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

By utility is meant that property is any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness(all this in the present case come to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party who whose is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community; if a particular individual; then the happiness of that individual

Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.

The offence is what is improperly called the death of an infant, who has ceased to be, before knowing what existence is, a result of a nature not to give the slightest inquietude to the most timid imagination; and which can cause no regrets but to the very person who, through a sentiment of shame and pity, has refused to prolong a life begun under the auspices of misery.

An absolute and unlimited right over any object of property would be the right to commit nearly every crime.If Ihad sucha right over thestick Iamaboutto cut, I might employ it as a mace to knock down the passengers, or I might convert it into a sceptre as an emblem of royalty, or into an idol to offend the national religion.

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

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

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.

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

If a man happen to take it into his head to assassinate with his own hands, or with the sword of justice, those whom he calls heretics, that is, people who think, or perhaps only speak, differently upon a subject which neither party understands, he will be as much inclined to do this at one time as at another. Fanaticism never sleeps: it is never glutted: it is never stopped by philanthropy; for it makes a merit of trampling on philanthropy: it is never stopped by conscience; for it has pressed conscience into its service. Avarice, lust, and vengeance, have piety, benevolence, honour; fanaticism has nothing to oppose it.

All poetry is misrepresentation.

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

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law. Systems which attempt to question it, deal in sounds instead of sense, in caprice instead of reason, in darkness instead of light.