24 quotes
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.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove.
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.
To what shall the character of utility be ascribed, if not to that which is a source of pleasure?
Théorie des peines et des récompenses (1811)
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.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
It is effects good or bad which we ought alone to consider.
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.
The Rationale of Reward (1811)
Secrecy is an instrument of conspiracy; it ought not, therefore, to be the system of a regular government.
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
Life of John Stuart Mill (1954)
Priestly 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.
All government is a trust. Every branch of government is a trust, and immemorially acknowledged to be so.
[I]n principle and in practice, in a right track and in a wrong one, the rarest of all human qualities is consistency.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
He ought to assure himself of two things; 1st, that in every case, the incidents which he tries to prevent are really evils; and 2ndly, that if evils, they are greater than those which he employs to prevent them.
Principles of Legislation (1830)
Ah! when will the yoke of Custom—Custom, the blind tyrant, of which all other tyrants make their slave—ah! when will that misery-perpetuating yoke be shaken off?—when, when will Reason be seated on her throne?
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.
The community is a fictitious body, composed of the individual persons who are considered as constituting as it were its members. The interest of the community then is what? The sum of the interests of the several members who compose it.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
That which has no existence cannot be destroyed — that which cannot be destroyed cannot require anything to preserve it from destruction. Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense — nonsense upon stilts.
Anarchical Fallacies (1796)
Intense, long, certain, speedy, fruitful, pure—
Such marks in pleasures and in pains endure.
Such pleasures seek if private be thy end:
If it be public, wide let them extend.
Such pains avoid, whichever be thy view:
If pains must come, let them extend to few.
An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789)
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.
By the principle of utility is meant that principle which approves or disapproves of every action whatsoever, according to the tendency it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question: or, what is the same thing in other words to promote or to oppose that happiness.