93 Quotes by Jeremy Bentham

Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity.

All poetry is misrepresentation.

Want keeps pace with dignity. Destitute of the lawful means of supporting his rank, his dignity presents a motive for malversation, and his power furnishes the means.

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.

Pleasure is in itself a good; nay, even setting aside immunity from pain, the only good.

The offence is what is improperly called the death of an infant, who has ceased to be, before knowing what existence is, a result of a nature not to give the slightest inquietude to the most timid imagination; and which can cause no regrets but to the very person who, through a sentiment of shame and pity, has refused to prolong a life begun under the auspices of misery.

Tyranny and anarchy are never far apart.

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.

[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.