Thomas Hobbes Quotes

No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues. ~ Thomas Hobbes

If nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Emulation is grief arising from seeing one's self, exceeded or excelled by his concurrent, together with hope to equal or exceed him in time to come, by his own ability. But envy is the same grief joined with pleasure conceived in the imagination of some ill-fortune that may befall him. ~ Thomas Hobbes

A democracy is no more than an aristocracy of orators. The people are so readily moved by demagogues that control must be exercised by the government over speech and press. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Such truth, as opposeth no man's profit, nor pleasure, is to all men welcome. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdom of God; and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; leavingthe world, and the Philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their natural Reason. ~ Thomas Hobbes

He that is to govern a whole Nation, must read in himselfe, not this, or that particular man; but Man-kind; ~ Thomas Hobbes

He that has most experience [is] so much more prudent than he that is new, as not to be equalled by any advantage of natural and extemporary wit- though many young men think the contrary. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Subjects have no greater liberty in a popular than in a monarchial state. That which deceives them is the equal participation of command. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as He presented to his sight ... ~ Thomas Hobbes

Humans are driven by a perpetual and restless desire of power. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Corporations are may lesser commonwealths in the bowels of a greater, like worms in the entrails of a natural man. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Men are not therefore put to death, or punished for that their theft proceedeth from election; but because it was noxious and contrary to men's preservation, and the punishment conducing to the preservation of the rest, inasmuch as to punish those that do voluntary hurt, and none else, frameth and maketh men's wills such as men would have them. ~ Thomas Hobbes

For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect. ~ Thomas Hobbes

As, in Sense, that which is really within us, is (as I have said before) only Motion, caused by the action of external objects, but in appearance; to the Sight, Light and Color; to the Ear, Sound; to the Nostril, Odor, &c. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The power of a man is his present means to obtain some future apparent good. ~ Thomas Hobbes

As soon as a thought darts, I write it down. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Hell is truth seen too late. ~ Thomas Hobbes

It's my turn, to take a leap into the darkness! ~ Thomas Hobbes

Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand. ~ Thomas Hobbes

For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination or by confederacy with others that are in the same danger with himself ~ Thomas Hobbes

Walker-thinkers have found various ways to accommodate the gifts that their walking brings. Caught paperless on his walks in the Czech enclaves of Iowa, maestro Dvořák scribbles the string quartets that visited his brain on his starched white shirt cuffs (so the legend goes). More proactively, Thomas Hobbes fashioned a walking stick for himself with an inkwell attached, and modern poet Mary Oliver leaves pencils in the trees along her usual pathways, in case a poem descends during her rambles. ~ Lyanda Lynn Haupt

As if it were Injustice to sell dearer than we buy; or to give more to a man than he merits. The value of all things contracted for, is measured by the Appetite of the Contractors: and therefore the just value, is that which they be contented to give. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Fear of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, [is] religion; not allowed, superstition. ~ Thomas Hobbes

For naturall Bloud is in like manner made of the fruits of the Earth; and circulating, nourisheth by the way, every Member of the Body of Man. ~ Thomas Hobbes

To speak impartially, both sayings are very true: that man to man is a kind of God; and that man to man is an arrant wolf. The first is true, if we compare citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare cities. ~ Thomas Hobbes

It is manifest therefore that they who have sovereign power, are immediate rulers of the church under Christ, and all others but subordinate to them. If that were not, but kings should command one thing upon pain of death, and priests another upon pain of damnation, it would be impossible that peace and religion should stand together. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Honoring the value of competence and steadfastness requires a generosity of spirit and a curbing of the passion for envy, traits that few people value and fewer still cultivate and acquire. Not until there is more of Smith and less of Hobbes in the human heart, will the majority of people prefer peaceful and boring market relations to the violent and exciting relations between coercer and coerced, predator and victim ~ Thomas Szasz

That Wisedome is acquired, not by reading of Books, but of Men. Consequently whereunto, those persons, that for the most part can give no other proof of being wise, take great delight to shew what they think they have read in men, by uncharitable censures of one another behind their backs. ~ Thomas Hobbes

When a man tells me God hath spoken in a dream, I know he dreamt that God spoke to him. ~ Thomas Hobbes

And because the constitution of a mans Body, is in continuall mutation; it is impossible that all the same things should alwayes cause in him the same Appetites, and aversions; much lesse can all men consent, in the Desire of almost any one and the same Object.
Good Evill
But whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is it, which he for his part calleth Good: And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, evill, And of his contempt, Vile, and Inconsiderable. For these words of Good, evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and evill, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the Person of the man (where there is no Common-wealth;) or, (in a Common-wealth,) From the Person that representeth it; or from an Arbitrator or Judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his sentence the Rule thereof. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Wisdom, properly so called, is nothing else but this: the perfect knowledge of the truth in all matters whatsoever. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The best men are the least suspicious of fraudulent purposes. ~ Thomas Hobbes

There be as many persons of a king, as there be petty constables in his kingdom. And so there are, or else he cannot be obeyed. But I never said that a king, and every one of his persons, are the same substance. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Liberty, to define it, is nothing other than the absence of impediments to motion ~ Thomas Hobbes

The Present only has a being in Nature; things Past have a being in the Memory only, but things to come have no being at all; the Future but a fiction of the mind. ~ Thomas Hobbes

And I profess still, that whatsoever the church of England (the church, I say, not every doctor) shall forbid me to say in matterof faith, I shall abstain from saying it, excepting this point, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for my sins. As for other doctrines, I think it unlawful, if the church define them, for any member of the church to contradict them. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The object of man's desire is not to enjoy once only, and for one instant of time; but to assure for ever, the way of his future desires. ~ Thomas Hobbes

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Respice finem; that is to say, in all your actions, look often upon what you would have, as the thing that directs all your thoughts in the way to attain it. ~ Thomas Hobbes

During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that conditions called war; and such a war, as if of every man, against every man. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Words are the money of fools. ~ Thomas Hobbes

There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Prophecy is many times the principal cause of the events foretold. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Reason is the Soul of the Law. ~ Thomas Hobbes

For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man's nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair. ~ Thomas Hobbes

When the nature of the thing is incomprehensible, I can acquiesce in the Scripture: but when the signification of words is incomprehensible, I cannot acquiesce in the authority of a Schoolman. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The universe, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, length, breadth and depth. Every part of the universe is 'body' and that which is not 'body' is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere. ~ Thomas Hobbes

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Love is a person's idea about his/her needs in other person what you are attracted to. ~ Thomas Hobbes

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides adduces a change in language as a major factor in Athens's descent from dysfunctional democracy through demagoguery into tyranny and anarchy: people began to define things in any way they pleased, he says, and the "normally accepted meaning of words" broke down. In his account of the Catiline crisis in republican Rome, Sallust has Cato the Younger identify the misuse of language - specifically the scission of word and meaning - as the underlying cause of the threat to the state. Society, Cato says, has lost the "vera vocabula rerum," literally, the "true names of things."18 In seventeenth-century England, Thomas Hobbes lived through a civil war he believed had been caused in significant measure by a war of words about religion - spread through the pervasive pamphleteering that printing had made possible - that had fatally weakened the linguistic common ground on which an ordered state depends. ~ Mark John Thompson

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Silence is sometimes an argument of Consent ~ Thomas Hobbes

Passions unguided are for the most part mere madness. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Religions are like pills, which must be swallowed whole without chewing. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Now I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark ~ Thomas Hobbes

The beliefs and behaviour of the Restoration reflect the theories of society put forward by Thomas Hobbes in The Leviathan, which was written in exile in Paris and published in 1651. Like many texts of the time, The Leviathan is an allegory. It recalls mediaeval rather than Renaissance thinking. The leviathan is the Commonwealth, society as a total organism, in which the individual is the absolute subject of state control, represented by the monarch. Man - motivated by self-interest - is acquisitive and lacks codes of behaviour. Hence the necessity for a strong controlling state, 'an artificial man', to keep discord at bay. Self-interest and stability become the keynotes of British society after 1660, the voice of the new middle-class bourgeoisie making itself heard more and more in the expression of values, ideals, and ethics. ~ Ronald Carter

If God bestowed immortality on every man then when he made him, and he made many to whom he never purposed to give his saving grace, what did his Lordship think that God gave any man immortality with purpose only to make him capable of immortal torments? It is a hard saying, and I think cannot piously be believed. I am sure it can never be proved by the canonical Scripture. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The right of nature ... is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life. ~ Thomas Hobbes

To be seduced by Orators, as a Monarch by Flatterers. ~ Thomas Hobbes

From the same it proceedeth,that men gives different names, to one and the same thing, from the difference of their own passions: As they that approve a private opinion, call it Opinion; but they that mislike it, Haeresie: and yet haeresie signifies no more than private opinion; but has only agreater tincture of choler ~ Thomas Hobbes

Ambition, and Covetousnesse are Passions that are perpetually incumbent, and pressing. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Do not that to another, which thou wouldst not have done to thyself. ~ Thomas Hobbes

In the state of nature profit is the measure of right. ~ Thomas Hobbes

And this Feare of things invisible, is the naturall Seed of that, which every one in himself calleth Religion; and in them that worship, or feare that Power otherwise than they do, Superstition. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Life itself is but Motion, and can never be without Desire, nor without Feare, no more than without Sense. ~ Thomas Hobbes

So that every Crime is a sinne; but not every sinne a Crime. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The most part of men, though they have the use of reasoning a little way, as in numbering to some degree; yet it serves them to little use in common life; in which they govern themselves, some better, some worse, according to their differences of experience, quickness of memory, and inclinations to several ends; but specially according to good or evil fortune, and the errors of one another. ~ Thomas Hobbes

From whence it happens, that they which trust to books, do as they that cast up many little sums into a greater, without considering whether those little sums were rightly cast up or not; and at last finding the error visible, and not mistrusting their first grounds, know not which way to clear themselves; but spend time in fluttering over their books, as birds that entering by the chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a chamber, flutter at the false light of a glass window, for want of wit to consider which way they came in. ~ Thomas Hobbes

When it happeneth that a man signifieth unto us two contradictory opinions whereof the one is clearly and directly signified, andthe other either drawn from that by consequence, or not known to be contradictory to it; then (when he is not present to explicate himself better) we are to take the former of his opinions; for that is clearly signified to be his, and directly, whereas the other might proceed from error in the deduction, or ignorance of the repugnancy. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The Imagination that is raised in man (or any other creature imbued with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signs, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beasts. ~ Thomas Hobbes

It's not the pace of life I mind. It's the sudden stop at the end. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes in his 1651 masterwork Leviathan. I strongly recommend that you read part III, chapter 38, and part IV, chapter 44, ~ Anonymous

By consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse. When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently. ~ Thomas Hobbes

So easy are men to be drawn to believe any thing, from such men as have gotten credit with them; and can with gentleness and dexterity take hold of their fear and ignorance. ~ Thomas Hobbes

And if this be madness in the multitude, it is the same in every particular man. For as in the midst of the sea, though a man perceive no sound of that part of the water next him, yet he is well assured that part contributes as much to the roaring of the sea as any other part of the same quantity: so also, though we perceive no great unquietness in one or two men, yet we may be well assured that their singular passions are parts of the seditious roaring of a troubled nation. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Geometry is the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow on mankind. ~ Thomas Hobbes

For if I should not believe all that is written by Historians, of the glorious acts of Alexander, or Caesar; I do not think the Ghost of Alexander, or Caesar, had any just cause to be offended; or any body else, but the Historian. If Livy say the Gods made once a Cow speak, and we believe it not; we distrust not God therein, but Livy. So that it is evident, that whatsoever we believe, upon no other reason, then what is drawn from authority of men only, and their writings; whether they be sent from God or not, is Faith in men only. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The oath adds nothing to the obligation. For a covenant, if lawful, binds in the sight of God, without the oath, as much as with it; if unlawful, bindeth not at all, though it be confirmed with an oath. ~ Thomas Hobbes

They that approve a private opinion, call it opinion; but they that dislike it, heresy; and yet heresy signifies no more than private opinion. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Setting themselves against reason, as often as reason is against them. ~ Thomas Hobbes

A Law of Nature, (Lex Naturalis) is a Precept, or general Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is forbidden to do, that, which is destructive of his life, or taketh away the means of preserving the same; and to omit, that, by which he thinketh it may be best preserved. ~ Thomas Hobbes

If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Corporations are "worms in the body politic" ~ Thomas Hobbes

About Thomas Hobbes: He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman's library, Euclid's Elements lay open, and "twas the 47 El. libri I" [Pythagoras' Theorem]. He read the proposition "By God", sayd he, "this is impossible:" So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry. ~ John Aubrey

No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it. ~ Thomas Hobbes

I often observe the absurdity of dreams, but never dream of the absurdity of my waking thoughts. ~ Thomas Hobbes

Nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind, as that though there be found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind than another, yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man and man is not so considerable as that one man can thereupon claim to himself any benefit to which another may not pretend as well as he. ~ Thomas Hobbes

The law is the public conscience. ~ Thomas Hobbes

That wee have of Geometry, which is the mother of all Naturall Science, wee are not indebted for it to the Schools. ~ Thomas Hobbes

What is the heart but a spring, and the nerves but so many strings, and the joints but so many wheels, giving motion to the whole body? ~ Thomas Hobbes

Understanding is by the flame of the passions never enlightened, but dazzled. ~ Thomas Hobbes

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind a perpetual and restless desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power: but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. ~ Thomas Hobbes

True and false are attributes of speech not of things. And where speech is not, there is neither truth nor falsehood. Error theremay be, as when we expect that which shall not be; or suspect what has not been: but in neither case can a man be charged with untruth. ~ Thomas Hobbes