Quotes from Thomas Hobbes

No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.

The condition of man... is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

A man's conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Men measure not only other men, but all other things, by themselves.

The power of a man is his present means to obtain some future apparent good.

If I had read as much as other men I would have known no more than they.

No man is bound by the words themselves, either to kill himselfe, or any other man.

Let a man (as most men do) rate themselves as the highest Value they can; yet their true Value is no more than it is esteemed by others.

Opinion of ghosts, ignorance of second causes, devotion to what men fear, and talking of things casual for prognostics, consisteth the natural seeds of religion

By how much one man has more experience of things past, than another, by so much also he is more prudent, and his expectations the seldomer fail him.

A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.

To understand this for sense it is not required that a man should be a geometrician or a logician, but that he should be mad.

A free man is he that, in those things which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to.

Whatsoever is the object of any man's Appetite or Desire; that is it which he for his part calleth Good: and the object of his Hate and Aversion, evil.

Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.

Words are the counters of wise men, but the money of fools.

Leisure is the mother of philosophy; and commonwealth, the mother of peace and leisure.

Government is necessary, not because man is naturally bad... but because man is by nature more individualistic than social.

All men, among themselves, are by nature equal. The inequality we now discern hath its spring from the civil law.

Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.

Nature itself cannot err

For to accuse requires less eloquence, such is man's nature, than to excuse; and condemnation, than absolution, more resembles justice.