Jeremy Bentham (/ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 [O.S. 4 February 1747] – 6 June 1832) was an English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism.
Priestly was the first (unless it was Becarria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth--that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
Bodies are real entities. Surfaces and lines are but fictitious entities. A surface without depth, a line without thickness, was never seen by any man; no; nor can any conception be seriously formed of its existence.
Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish something of their pains. And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find a harvest in your own bosom; while every sorrow which you pluck out from the thoughts and feelings of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful peace and joy in the sanctuary of your soul.
I don't care whether animals are capable of thinking; all I care about is that they are capable of suffering!
If Christianity needed an Anti-Christ, they needed look no farther than Paul.
It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual
O Logic: born gatekeeper to the Temple of Science, victim of capricious destiny: doomed hitherto to be the drudge of pedants: come to the aid of thy master, Legislation
What is it that should trace the insuperable line?. . . The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?
Those physical difficulties which you cannot account for, be very slow to arraign; for he that would be wiser than Nature would be wiser than God.
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.
Right. . . is the child of law.
Judges of elegance and taste consider themselves as benefactors to the human race, whilst they are really only the interrupters of their pleasure. . . There is no taste which deserves the epithet good, unless it be the taste for such employments which, to the pleasure actually produced by them, conjoin some contingent or future utility: there is no taste which deserves to be characterized as bad, unless it be a taste for some occupation which has mischievous tendency.
Reputation is the road to power
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
We may scatter the seeds of courtesy and kindness about us at little expense. Some of them will fall on good ground, and grow up into benevolence in the minds of others, and all of them will bear fruit of happiness in the bosom whence they spring.
By utility is meant that property is any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happiness(all this in the present case come to the same thing) or (what comes again to the same thing) to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil or unhappiness to the party who whose is considered: if that party be the community in general, then the happiness of the community; if a particular individual; then the happiness of that individual
All poetry is misrepresentation.
[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.
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.
All government is a trust. Every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged to be so.