Quotes from Jeremy Bentham

All punishment in itself is evil.

Submit not to any decree or other act of power, of the justice of which you are not yourself perfectly convinced. If a constable call upon you to serve in the militia, shoot the constable and not the enemy. If the commander of a press-gang trouble you, push him into the sea. If a bailiff, throw him out of the window. If a judge sentence you to be imprisoned or put to death, have a dagger ready, and take a stroke first at the judge.

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.

As to the members of a Democracy, they are the best sort of people in the world; but then they are but a puny sort of gentry, as to strength, put them all together; and apt to be a little defective in point of understanding.

Our race of real freedom is only beginning; hitherto there has been freedom for a party--licence for a faction, but the great mass of the people have been in bondage.

Every law is an evil, for every law is an infraction of liberty.

Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.

From real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.

Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure.

Kind words cost no more than unkind ones ... and we may scatter the seeds of courtesy and kindliness around us at so little expense.

Conduciveness to happiness being then the test of virtue, and all happiness being composed of our own happiness and that of others, the production of our own happiness is prudence, the production of the happiness of others is effective benevolence. The tree of virtue is thus divided into to great stems, out of which grow all the other branches of virtue.

Kings are (nay were before they were Kings, since it was this qualification determined their subjects to make them Kings) as strong as so many Hercules's; but then, as to their wisdom, or their goodness, there is not much to say.

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.

There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.

It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

A full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational, as well as a more conversable animal, than an infant of a day, or a week, or even a month old. But suppose the case were otherwise, what would it avail? The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?

The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

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

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

Ravaillac assassinated one of the best and wisest of sovereigns, at a time when a good and wise sovereign, a blessing at all times so valuable to a state, was particularly precious: and that to the inhabitants of a populous and extensive empire. He is taken, and doomed to the most excruciating tortures. His son, well persuaded of his being a sincere penitent, and that mankind, in case of his being at large, would have nothing more to fear from him, effectuates his escape.

Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—nonsense upon stilts.

By the principle of asceticism I mean that principle, which, like the principle of utility, approves or disapproves of any action, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question; but in an inverse manner: approving of actions in as far as they tend to diminish his happiness; disapproving of them in as far as they tend to augment it.

Where the penal provision, though established, is not conveyed to the notice of the person on whom it seems intended that it should operate. Such is the case where the law has omitted to employ any of the expedients which are necessary, to make sure that every person whatsoever, who is within the reach of the law, be apprised of all the cases whatsoever, in which (being in the station of life he is in) he can be subjected to the penalties of the law.

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