Jeremy Bentham Quotes

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

Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove.

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

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.

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

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

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

Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.

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

It is with government as with medicine, its only business is the choice of evils. Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty.

What is it that should trace the insuperable line? ...The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

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

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.

...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

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

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

Reputation is the road to power

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

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

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

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

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

Right... is the child of law.

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

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

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

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.

Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.

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

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.

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

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

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.

A civilized society must count animals as worthy of moral consideration and ethical treatment. The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

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.

[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

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

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

Priestly was the first (unless it was Becarria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth--that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

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

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.

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

All poetry is misrepresentation.

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

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

To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?

The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.

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.

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.