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

Jeremy Bentham

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Jeremy Bentham
Died: 1832
Died: June 6
Human Rights Activist
Jurist
Lawyer
Merchant
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Suffragist
Gamaliel Smith
Philip Beauchamp
Truth
Right
Measure
Number
Numbers
Greatest
Wrong
Happiness

More quotes by Jeremy Bentham

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Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.
Jeremy Bentham
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Pleasure is in itself a good nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good.
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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All government is a trust. Every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged to be so.
Jeremy Bentham
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Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
Jeremy Bentham
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[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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I don't care whether animals are capable of thinking all I care about is that they are capable of suffering!
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.
Jeremy Bentham
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Unkind language is sure to produce the fruits of unkindness--that is, suffering in the bosom of others.
Jeremy Bentham
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All punishment is mischief all punishment in itself is evil.
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.
Jeremy Bentham
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To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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The request of industry to government is as modest as that of Diogenes to Alexander: Get out of my light.
Jeremy Bentham