Best 64 quotes of Jeremy Bentham on MyQuotes

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?

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish something of their pains. And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find a harvest in your own bosom; while every sorrow which you pluck out from the thoughts and feelings of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful peace and joy in the sanctuary of your soul.

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

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

Right... is the child of law.

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

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.