Jeremy Bentham
Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.Collection: Moving
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.Collection: Support
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.Collection: Government
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.Collection: Law
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.Collection: Real
All poetry is misrepresentation.Collection: Poetry
The question is not can animals speak but can they suffer.Collection: Animal
The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.Collection: Atheism
Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity.Collection: Justice
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.Collection: Regret
[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.Collection: Practice
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.Collection: Would Be
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, LegislationCollection: Math
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.Collection: Mean
The addability of the happiness of different subjects is a postulum without which all political reasonings are at a standCollection: Political
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.Collection: Happiness
An absolute and unlimited right over any object of property would be the right to commit nearly every crime.If Ihad sucha right over thestick Iamaboutto cut, I might employ it as a mace to knock down the passengers, or I might convert it into a sceptre as an emblem of royalty, or into an idol to offend the national religion.Collection: Cutting
To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?Collection: Character
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.Collection: Fate
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.Collection: Fall
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.Collection: Ambition