Jeremy Bentham Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

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

Jeremy Bentham
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.

Jeremy Bentham
The Fool had stuck himself up one day, with great gravity, in the King's throne; with a stick, by way of a sceptre, in one hand, and a ball in the other: being asked what he was doing? he answered 'reigning'. Much of the same sort of reign, I take it would be that of our Author's [Blackstone's] Democracy.

Jeremy Bentham
That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts. But this rhetorical nonsense ends in the old strain of mischievous nonsense for immediately a list of these pretended natural rights is given, and those are so expressed as to present to view legal rights. And of these rights, whatever they are, there is not, it seems, any one of which any government can, upon any occasion whatever, abrogate the smallest particle.

Jeremy Bentham
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.

Jeremy Bentham
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.

Jeremy Bentham
The principle of utility judges any action to be right by the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interests are in question... if that party be the community the happiness of the community, if a particular individual, the happiness of that individual.

Jeremy Bentham
It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

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

Jeremy Bentham
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.

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

Jeremy Bentham
He rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many.
Of James Mill

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

Jeremy Bentham