Jeremy Bentham Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

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
A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

Jeremy Bentham
All punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil.

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

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

Jeremy Bentham
The infirmity of human nature renders all plans precarious in the execution in proportion as they are extensive in design.

Jeremy Bentham
Right…is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.

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

Jeremy Bentham
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.

Jeremy Bentham
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
I do really take it for an indisputable truth, and a truth that is one of the corner stones of political science—the more strictly we are watched, the better we behave.

Jeremy Bentham
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.

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

Jeremy Bentham
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...

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

Jeremy Bentham
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.

Jeremy Bentham
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.

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

Jeremy Bentham
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.

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

Jeremy Bentham
The day has been, I grieve to say in many places it is not yet past, in which the greater part of the species, under the denomination of slaves, have been treated by the law exactly upon the same footing as, in England for example, the inferior races of animals are still.

Jeremy Bentham
In principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

Jeremy Bentham
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
By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is that same thing in other words, to promote or to oppose that happiness.

Jeremy Bentham
Whenever you are about to be oppressed, you have a right to resist oppression: whenever you conceive yourself to be oppressed, conceive yourself to have a right to make resistance, and act accordingly.

Jeremy Bentham
Secresy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.

Jeremy Bentham