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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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Jeremy Bentham
Died: 1832
Died: June 6
Human Rights Activist
Jurist
Lawyer
Merchant
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Suffragist
Gamaliel Smith
Philip Beauchamp
Evil
Business
Infraction
Government
Evils
Every
Medicine
Choice
Liberty
Choices
Law

More quotes by Jeremy Bentham

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The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.
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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The age we live in is a busy age in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection.
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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Create all the happiness you are able to create remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you, --will invite you to add something to the pleasure of others, --or to diminish something of their pains.
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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There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.
Jeremy Bentham
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Every law is an infraction of liberty.
Jeremy Bentham
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As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.
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
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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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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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Right... is the child of law.
Jeremy Bentham
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Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.
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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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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The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.
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 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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To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?
Jeremy Bentham