Quotes from Jeremy Bentham

Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.

...the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.

Reputation is the road to power

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.

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.

Every law is an infraction of liberty.

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.

Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.

The question is not, 'Can they reason?' nor, 'Can they talk?' but rather, 'Can they suffer?'

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

The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.

Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure - they govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off our subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm

It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.

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

As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends.

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.

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.

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.