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.
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.
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.
Publicity is the very soul of justice. It is the keenest spur to exertion, and the surest of all guards against improbity.
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...
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense – nonsense upon stilts.
If Christianity needed an Anti-Christ, they needed look no farther than Paul.
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.
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?
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.
No power of government ought to be employed in the endeavor to establish any system or article of belief on the subject of religion.
As to the evil which results from censorship, it is impossible to measure it, because it is impossible to tell where it ends.
The addability of the happiness of different subjects is a postulum without which all political reasonings are at a stand.
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.
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall short of it.
Is it possible for a man to move the earth? Yes; but he must first find out another earth to stand upon.
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.
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.
The spirit of dogmatic theology poisons anything it touches.
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.
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.