Top 40 Jeremy Bentham Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “A civilized society must count animals as worthy of moral consideration and ethical treatment. The question is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

— Jeremy Bentham

2. “Create all the happiness you are able to create; remove all the misery you are able to remove.”

— Jeremy Bentham

3. “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

4. “Nature has placed mankind under the government of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure.”

— Jeremy Bentham

5. “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

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

— Jeremy Bentham

7. “Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts.”

— Jeremy Bentham

8. “It is vain to talk of the interest of the community, without understanding what is the interest of the individual.”

— Jeremy Bentham

9. “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

10. “Lawyers sometimes tell the truth. They’ll do anything to win a case.”

— Jeremy Bentham

11. “The word “independence” is united to the accessory ideas of dignity and virtue. The word “dependence” is united to the ideas of inferiority and corruption.”

— Jeremy Bentham

12. “Happiness is a very pretty thing to feel, but very dry to talk about.”

— Jeremy Bentham

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

— Jeremy Bentham

14. “The day may come when the rest of the animal creation may acquire those rights which never could have been withholden from them but by the hand of tyranny.”

— Jeremy Bentham

15. “All poetry is misrepresentation.”

— Jeremy Bentham

16. “The question is not can animals speak but can they suffer.”

— Jeremy Bentham

17. “The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.”

— Jeremy Bentham

18. “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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19. “The quantity of pleasure being equal, push-pin is as good as poetry.”

— Jeremy Bentham

20. “Reputation is the road to power.”

— Jeremy Bentham

21. “Nonsense on stilts.”

— Jeremy Bentham

22. “Every law is an infraction of liberty.”

— Jeremy Bentham

23. “There is no pestilence in a state like a zeal for religion, independent of morality.”

— Jeremy Bentham

24. “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

25. “I don’t care whether animals are capable of thinking; all I care about is that they are capable of suffering!”

— Jeremy Bentham

26. “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”

— Jeremy Bentham

27. “How is property given? By restraining liberty; that is, by taking it away so far as necessary for the purpose. How is your house made yours? By debarring every one else from the liberty of entering it without your leave.”

— Jeremy Bentham

28. “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

29. “He who thinks and thinks for himself, will always have a claim to thanks; it is no matter whether it be right or wrong, so as it be explicit. If it is right, it will serve as a guide to direct; if wrong, as a beacon to warn.”

— Jeremy Bentham

30. “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.”

— Jeremy Bentham

31. “Without publicity, no good is permanent; under the auspices of publicity, no evil can continue.”

— Jeremy Bentham

32. “To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?”

— Jeremy Bentham

33. “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.”

— Jeremy Bentham

34. “The request of industry to government is as modest as that of Diogenes to Alexander: Get out of my light.”

— Jeremy Bentham

35. “The turn of a sentence has decided the fate of many a friendship, and, for aught that we know, the fate of many a kingdom.”

— Jeremy Bentham

36. “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

37. “If Christianity needed an Anti-Christ, they needed look no farther than Paul.”

— Jeremy Bentham

38. “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.”

— Jeremy Bentham

39. “The addability of the happiness of different subjects is a postulum without which all political reasonings are at a stand.”

— Jeremy Bentham

40. “All government is a trust. Every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged to be so.”

— Jeremy Bentham

41. “No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.”

— Jeremy Bentham

42. “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.”

— Jeremy Bentham

43. “Unkind language is sure to produce the fruits of unkindness – that is, suffering in the bosom of others.”

— Jeremy Bentham

44. “For the same sentiment of antipathy, if implicitly deferred to, may be, and very frequently is, productive of the very worst effects. Antipathy, therefore, can never be a right ground of action.”

— Jeremy Bentham

45. “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.”

— Jeremy Bentham

46. “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.”

— Jeremy Bentham

47. “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