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The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding or some error in reasoning or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance in reasoning, erroneous opinion.

Thomas Hobbes

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Thomas Hobbes
Age: 91 †
Born: 1588
Born: April 5
Died: 1679
Died: December 4
Economist
Historian
Mathematician
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Politician
Translator
Westport
Wiltshire
Hobbes
Thomas Hobbsted
Thomas Hobbes of Malflutry
Crime
Defect
Source
Defects
Opinion
Passions
Passion
Reasoning
Understanding
Sudden
Force
Error
Every
Errors
Leviathan
Ignorance
Erroneous

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If any two men desire the same thing, which nevertheless they cannot both enjoy, they become enemies.
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If nobody makes you do it, it counts as fun.
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Covenants without swords are but words.
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A Covenant not to defend myself from force, by force, is always void. For... no man can transfer or lay down his Right to save himself from Death.
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By consequence, or train of thoughts, I understand that succession of one thought to another which is called, to distinguish it from discourse in words, mental discourse. When a man thinketh on anything whatsoever, his next thought after is not altogether so casual as it seems to be. Not every thought to every thought succeeds indifferently.
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No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact.
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The first cause of Absurd conclusions I ascribe to the want of Method.
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Those men that are so remissly governed that they dare take up arms to defend or introduce an opinion, are still in war, and their condition not peace, but only a cessation of arms for fear of one another, and they live as it were in the precincts of battle continually.
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To this war of every man against every man, this also in consequent that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice have there no place. Where there is no common power, there is no law, where no law, no injustice. Force, and fraud, are in war the cardinal virtues.
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The first author of speech was God himself, that instructed Adam how to name such creatures as He presented to his sight.
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Government is necessary, not because man is naturally bad... but because man is by nature more individualistic than social.
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But if one Subject giveth Counsell to another, to do anything contrary to the Lawes, whether that Counsell proceed from evil intention, or from ignorance onely, it is punishable by the Common-wealth because igorance of the Law, is no good excuse, where every man is bound to take notice of the Lawes to which he is subject.
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Immortality is a belief grounded upon other men's sayings, that they knew it supernaturally or that they knew those who knew them that knew others that knew it supernaturally.
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The errors of definitions multiply themselves according as the reckoning proceeds and lead men into absurdities, which at last they see but cannot avoid, without reckoning anew from the beginning.
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If I read as many books as most men do, I would be as dull-witted as they are.
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The power of a man is his present means to obtain some future apparent good.
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Wisdom, properly so called, is nothing else but this: the perfect knowledge of the truth in all matters whatsoever.
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They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government.
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To conclude, The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity Reason is the pace Encrease of Science, the way and the Benefit of man-kind, the end.
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Seeing then that truth consisteth in the right ordering of names in our affirmations, a man that seeketh precise truth, had need to remember what every name he uses stands for and to place it accordingly or else he will find himself entangled in words, as a bird in lime-twigs the more he struggles, the more belimed.
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