Jeremy Bentham

It is the greatest good to the greatest number of people which is the measure of right and wrong.

— Jeremy Bentham

Priestley was the first (unless it was Beccaria) who taught my lips to pronounce this sacred truth — that the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

— Jeremy Bentham

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

— Jeremy Bentham

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

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.

— Jeremy Bentham

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

Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.

— Jeremy Bentham

The principle of utility judges any action to be right by the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interests are in question... if that party be the community the happiness of the community, if a particular individual, the happiness of that individual.

— Jeremy Bentham

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

— Jeremy Bentham

Lawyers are the only persons in whom ignorance of the law is not punished.

— Jeremy Bentham

Secrecy, being an instrument of conspiracy, ought never to be the system of a regular government.

— Jeremy Bentham

The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.

— Jeremy Bentham

The age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection.

— Jeremy Bentham

The age we live in is a busy age; in which knowledge is rapidly advancing towards perfection.

— Jeremy Bentham

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

The said truth is that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong.

— Jeremy Bentham