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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
Law
Evil
Business
Infraction
Government
Evils
Every
Medicine
Choice
Liberty
Choices

More quotes by 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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The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.
Jeremy Bentham
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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.
Jeremy Bentham
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Reputation is the road to power
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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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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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 question is not can animals speak but can they suffer.
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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Stretching his hand up to reach the stars, too often man forgets the flowers at his feet.
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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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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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
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Every law is an infraction of liberty.
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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Lawyers sometimes tell the truth. They'll do anything to win a case.
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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All punishment is mischief all punishment in itself is evil.
Jeremy Bentham