Jeremy Bentham - Mischievous Quotes

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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
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
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