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Subject Area: Political Theory
Subject Area: Law

Pensées. - Jeremy Bentham, The Works of Jeremy Bentham, vol. 10 (Memoirs Part I and Correspondence) [1843]

Edition used:

The Works of Jeremy Bentham, published under the Superintendence of his Executor, John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1838-1843). 11 vols. Vol. 10.

Part of: The Works of Jeremy Bentham, 11 vols.

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Pensées.

“Suppose the topic were, the obligation which day labourers are under to work upon the roads, from the improvement of which, having neither horses nor carriages, it is said they reap no benefit.

“A company are discoursing on this law; and they all agree in censuring it:—

“ ‘It is hard,’ says one.

“ ‘It is unequal,’ says another.

“ ‘It is inequitable,’ says a third.

“ ‘It is most hard and unjust,’ says a fourth.

“ ‘It is oppressive,’ says a fifth.

“ ‘It is tyrannical,’ says a sixth.

“ ‘It is infamous,’ says a seventh.

“ ‘It is fiagitious,’ says an eighth.

“ ‘The man who framed it is a tyrant,’ says a ninth.

“ ‘Some unfeeling landlord—a blood-sucker of the poor,’ says a tenth.

“ ‘The case is not very different with the majority who passed it,’ says an eleventh.

“ ‘When you are about it, you may go a little higher,’ says a twelfth.

“ ‘These are your Right Reverend Fathers in God,’ says a thirteenth.

“No, indeed; as to them, you are mistaken, since it is a miracle if they ever trouble their heads, of their own accord, about anything, good or bad, except when it is to stand up for the violation of the rights of conscience.

“ ‘This is your pious king,’ says a fourteenth.

“ ‘We might as well send for one from Morocco,’ says a fifteenth.”

“Scandal is to the Moral Sanction, what Perjury is to the Political.”

“France may have philosophers. The world is witness if she have not philosophers. But it is England only that can have patriots, for a patriot is a philosopher in action.”

“If there was a language peculiar to innocence, it could be so only for one moment, for the next it would be usurped by guilt.”

“Nothing can be more flattering to the indolent, the disingenuous, the domineering spirit which lurks more or less in all men, than a practice for uniting in one’s own person the character of advocate and judge. Socrates had his Dæmon.”

“Let us profit from the most irrational and detestable of all systems, nor spurn a pearl though we find it in a dunghill.”