Jeremy Bentham Quotes - Page 2

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

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

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?

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.

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

Reputation is the road to power

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.

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

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

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.

Right... is the child of law.

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.

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

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

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

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.

We may scatter the seeds of courtesy and kindness about us at little expense. Some of them will fall on good ground, and grow up into benevolence in the minds of others, and all of them will bear fruit of happiness in the bosom whence they spring.

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

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

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.

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.

All poetry is misrepresentation.

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 question is not can animals speak but can they suffer.