Top 72 Quotes & Sayings by Jeremy Bentham - Page 2

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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