"Bentham" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Mr. Bentham, in his "History of Ely Cathedral," says, that one of the earliest spires of which we have any account, "is that of old St. Paul's, finished in the year 1222." This spire was of timber covered with lead; "but, not long after, they began to build them of stone, and to finish ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. - Volume 13, No. 359, Saturday, March 7, 1829. • Various
... nor an honest man, but was 'a sort of whiffling, shuffling, cunning, silly, contemptible, unmeaning negation of the two.' And the true genuine radical reformers? To them, as represented by the school of Bentham, Hazlitt entertained an aversion quite as hearty as his aversion for Whigs and Tories. If, he says, the Whigs are too finical to join heartily with the popular advocates, the Reformers are too cold. They hated literature, poetry, and romance; nothing gives ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... skeleton of the stranded whale, accurate hints may be derived touching his true form. Not at all. For it is one of the more curious things about this Leviathan, that his skeleton gives very little idea of his general shape. Though Jeremy Bentham's skeleton, which hangs for candelabra in the library of one of his executors, correctly conveys the idea of a burly-browed utilitarian old gentleman, with all Jeremy's other leading personal characteristics; yet nothing of this kind could be inferred from any leviathan's articulated bones. In ...
— Moby Dick; or The Whale • Herman Melville
... century saw the same lesson repeated in England. It had its Utilitarians, its Christian Socialists, its Fabians (still extant): it had Bentham, Mill, Dickens, Ruskin, Carlyle, Butler, Henry George, and Morris. And the end of all their efforts is the Chicago described by Mr Upton Sinclair, and the London in which the people who pay to be amused by my dramatic representation ...
— Bernard Shaw's Preface to Major Barbara • George Bernard Shaw
... pretended." Mill is wrong in supposing that his use of the term "was the first time that any one had taken the title of Utilitarian"; and Galt, who represents his annalist as writing of the year 1794, is historically justified. Writing in 1781 Bentham uses the word 'utilitarian,' and again in 1802 he definitely asserts that it is the only name of his creed ('Works,' x. 92, 392). M. Halevy ('L'evolution de la doctrine utilitaire,' p. 300) draws attention to the presence of the word in ...
— Recent Tendencies in Ethics • William Ritchie Sorley
... is neither tory nor whig, but a radical, a utilitarian, an adorer of Bentham, a worshiper of Mill, an advocate for vote by ballot, an opponent of hereditary aristocracy, the church establishment, the army and navy, which he deems sources of unnecessary national expense; though who is to take care of our souls ...
— Records of a Girlhood • Frances Anne Kemble
... position fourteen years afterwards, Bentham remarked:—"These views, generally received by the great majority of naturalists at the time De Candolle wrote, and still maintained by a few, must, if adhered to, check all further enquiry into ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... the plants of his last expedition, presented to the British Museum by Sir Thomas Mitchell, there is a plant which seems to belong to the genus Pentadynamis, which is probably, therefore, one of the species of Vigna, described by Mr. Bentham. ...
— Expedition into Central Australia • Charles Sturt
... an excellent description. Compare Locke, i. 261, ii. 97. The doctrine of utility is probably nearly as old as philosophy itself. It has been well suggested that although not the ultimate motive of virtue, utility may be the test of morals. It was, in a measure, Helvetius that inspired Bentham. Morley, Diderot, ii. 154.] ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time. All the reason in the world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head. That ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... contrary, "in our opinion the danger lies not in that fantastic revolutionary hydra, but in the obstinacy of traditionalism clogging progress," etc., etc. He read another article, too, a financial one, which alluded to Bentham and Mill, and dropped some innuendoes reflecting on the ministry. With his characteristic quickwittedness he caught the drift of each innuendo, divined whence it came, at whom and on what ground it was aimed, and that afforded him, as ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... furnished a systematic enumeration, which will be found in the Appendix. This enumeration must not, however, be accepted as final, for Dr. Muller has forwarded all the specimens to England for the inspection of Mr. Bentham, the learned President of the Linnaean Society of London, who is now elaborating his great and exhaustive work on the Flora of Australia, the second volume of which will ...
— Explorations in Australia, The Journals of John McDouall Stuart • John McDouall Stuart
... be maintained that time, even a little time, makes an essential difference in the conception of any object. Mittermaier, and indeed Bentham, have shown what an influence the interval between observation and announcement exercises on the form of exposition. The witness who is immediately examined may, perhaps, say the same thing that he would say several weeks after— but his presentation is different, he uses different words, ...
— Robin Hood • J. Walker McSpadden
... however refrain from paying my tribute of respect to Mr. George Bentham, the most industrious, perspicuous, and philosophical Botanist who has systematically contributed to lessen the difficulties under which Indian ...
— Journals of Travels in Assam, Burma, Bhootan, Afghanistan and The - Neighbouring Countries • William Griffith
... without being certainly hanged for it, gives thee no permission to steal! Thou shalt not in anywise steal at all! So it is written down, for Nations and for Men, in the Law-Book of the Maker of this Universe. Nay, poor Jeremy Bentham and others step in here, and will demonstrate that it is actually our true convenience and expediency not to steal; which I for my share, on the great scale and on the small, and in all conceivable scales and shapes, do also firmly believe it to be. For example, if ...
— The Life of Charles Dickens, Vol. I-III, Complete • John Forster
... here give such cases as I have collected. Many alpine plants ascend mountains beyond the height at which they can produce seed.[428] Certain species of {170} Poa and Festuca, when growing on mountain-pastures, propagate themselves, as I hear from Mr. Bentham, almost exclusively by bulblets. Kalm gives a more curious instance[429] of several American trees, which grow so plentifully in marshes or in thick woods, that they are certainly well adapted for these stations, yet scarcely ever produce ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Volume II (of 2) • Charles Darwin
... nowadays, I submit, in disposing of Encyclopaedic conceptions of College Education, conceptions that played a part in almost all educational schemes—Bentham's stupendous Chrestomathia is the fearful example—before the middle nineteenth century. We are all agreed in theory, at any rate, that to know one subject or group of subjects exhaustively is far better ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... soldier to fight his battles over again. In this readiness to recount his own exploits, there was nothing that seemed like silly or obtrusive vanity. It often reminded me of the following just remark in the Westminster Review, applied to Jeremy Bentham: "The very egotism in which he occasionally indulged was a manifestation of a want of self-thought. This unpopular failing is, after all, one of the characteristics of a natural and simple mind. It requires ...
— Isaac T. Hopper • L. Maria Child
... the most imperfect is government. In spite of the essays of Bentham and Mill the science of government has yet to be discovered. The ideal statesman can only exist in the ideal state, which has ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... made for unity something should be said of the conception of a law of nature. The phrase has been out of fashion in this country since the days of Bentham and Austin, who laid stress upon the positive, one might say arbitrary, character of the only law which they would recognize as law in the proper sense of the word. I am not concerned here to discuss its philosophical validity. But it has never been lost sight of. It is one of ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... to my lower deep once more. My name is JEREMY BENTHAM; I am very unhappy in my mind; and, with your permission, will often escape this way from him who is the bane of ...
— Punchinello, Vol. 1, No. 24, September 10, 1870 • Various
... last, however, and it was a rude one. The liberal principles of the French Revolution, checked at first in the terrors of reaction, began to make their way into England. Rationalists lifted up their heads; Bentham and the Mills propounded Utilitarianism; the Reform Bill was passed; and there were rumours abroad of disestablishment. Even Churchmen seemed to have caught the infection. Dr. Whately was so bold as to assert that, in the interpretation of Scripture, ...
— Eminent Victorians • Lytton Strachey
... have time and again made the mistake of simplifying human life to a single motive or driving power. Hobbes rested his case on fear; Bain and Sutherland on sympathy; Tarde on imitation; Adam Smith and Bentham on enlightened self-interest. In our own day the Freudians interpret everything as being sexual in its motive. And most recently has come an interpretation of life, as in Bertrand Russell and Helen Marot, in terms of ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... their lives, notwithstanding the widely different stations which they subsequently filled. Serre and Badollet are only remembered from their connection with Gallatin. Dumont was of different mould. He was the friend of Mirabeau, the disciple and translator of Bentham,—a man of elegant acquirement, but, in the judgment of Gallatin, "without original genius." De Lolme was in the class above Gallatin. He had such facility in the acquisition of languages that he was able to write his famous work on the English ...
— Albert Gallatin - American Statesmen Series, Vol. XIII • John Austin Stevens
... of courtly grace, He left you first, and I must own The manners of the highest class Have latterly vexatious grown; And though perchance a lady may Discourse of Bentham or of Say, Yet as a rule their talk I call Harmless, but quite nonsensical. Then they're so innocent of vice, So full of piety, correct, So prudent, and so circumspect Stately, devoid of prejudice, So inaccessible to men, Their looks alone produce ...
— Eugene Oneguine [Onegin] - A Romance of Russian Life in Verse • Aleksandr Sergeevich Pushkin
... materials for his Sentimental Journey; Sir William Blackstone had published his celebrated Commentaries; Wesley and Whitefield had not yet ended their useful career; the star of Edmund Burke was rising; and Jeremy Bentham, being then (1766) but seventeen years of age, had taken his master's degree at Oxford, although, it is true, the first literary performance of the eccentric philosopher did not appear till some ...
— Chambers's Edinburgh Journal, No. 424, New Series, February 14, 1852 • Various
... Jeremy Bentham who said: "In order to love mankind, we must not expect too much of them." And Goethe had a still deeper vision when he said: "Who is the happiest of men? He who values the merits of others, and in their pleasure takes joy, even as ...
— The Higher Powers of Mind and Spirit • Ralph Waldo Trine
... according to Hooker and Thomson or Bentham and Hooker,[1] is the only species of this genus; the plants formerly classed together with it under the names Unona or Uvaria, among which some equally possess odorous flowers, are now distributed between those two genera, which ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 288 - July 9, 1881 • Various
... reclaiming waste land. His treatment of the question of poor relief is too extensive a subject to admit of adequate description here; but I propose to return to it and to notice somewhat fully the criticisms of Bentham and others.[434] It must suffice to say that the draft of that measure bespeaks a keen interest in the welfare of the poor, and indeed errs on the side of generosity. Abbot, afterwards Lord Colchester, ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... must now endeavour to show. We cannot illustrate our contention better than from the popular simplification of Ethics introduced by Bentham. Taking pleasure as a simple and ultimate notion he affirms that our conduct is always determined by a balance of pleasure on one side or the other. The problem of practical ethics is to construct a calculus of pleasures, a sort of ready-reckoner whereby men may be able to invest ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... in many respects, well founded confidence with which Colonel Stanhope appealed to the authority of Mr. Bentham on most of the points at issue between himself and Lord Byron, was, from that natural antipathy which seems to exist between political economists and poets, but little sympathised in by the latter;—such appeals being always met by him with those sallies of ridicule, ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. 6 (of 6) - With his Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... substitute indeed for the light that is from heaven. Above all, it flings, as indeed we have intimated, an air of absurdity over the orthodox Church-of-Englandism—for once to quote a not inexpressive barbarism of Bentham—which every now and then breaks out either in passing compliment—amounting to but a bow—or in eloquent laudation, during which the poet appears to be prostrate on his knees. He speaks nobly of cathedrals, and minsters, ...
— Recreations of Christopher North, Volume 2 • John Wilson
... the seeds of courtesy and kindness around us at so little expense. Some of them will inevitably fall on good ground, and grow up into benevolence in the minds of others: and all of them will bear fruit of happiness in the bosom whence they spring.—BENTHAM. ...
— Many Thoughts of Many Minds - A Treasury of Quotations from the Literature of Every Land and Every Age • Various
... sufficient praise for the critic that those of whom he has undertaken to treat stand irreversibly judged in his pages. He is generous toward Campbell and Moore, who were both personally hostile to him; he is scrupulously honest toward Bentham, with whose system he had no sympathy. The concluding pages of his sketch of Southey, in view of that poet's rancor against him, are almost defiant in their magnanimity. His adverse judgments, moreover, are as permanent as his favorable ones. He pronounced the verdict ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... legislative sagacity we may note that she asks that we should put back the clock, and return to the days when any arbitrary principle might be adduced as a ground for legislation. It is as if Bentham had ...
— The Unexpurgated Case Against Woman Suffrage • Almroth E. Wright
... applies spontaneously for punishments, though he does not always submit when the request is granted. But this is a concession under difficulties. His general position is that by punishing him his mother only 'procures him to be much more naughty,' and he declines as resolutely as Jeremy Bentham to admit that naughtiness in itself involves unhappiness, or that the happiness of naughtiness should not be taken into account. He frequently urges that it is pleasanter while it lasts to give way to temper, and that the ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... genre humain" to Michael Chevalier; "Liebes Mutterlein" to John Stuart Mill; and "My own Professorin" to Charles Buller, to whom she taught German, as well as to the sons of Mr. James Mill.' Jeremy Bentham, when on his deathbed, gave her a ring with his portrait and some of his hair let in behind. 'There, my dear,' he said, 'it is the only ring I ever gave a woman.' She corresponded with Guizot, Barthelemy de St. Hilaire, the Grotes, ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object. The personal ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... BENTHAM, JEREMY (1748-1832).—Writer on jurisprudence and politics, b. in London, s. of a prosperous attorney, ed. at Westminster and Oxford, was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn, but disliking the law, he made little or no effort to practise, but devoted himself ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... of Bentham Gibbes is familiar to everyone, connected as it is with the much-advertised pickles, whose glaring announcements in crude crimson and green strike the eye throughout Great Britain, and shock the artistic sense wherever seen. Me! I have never tasted them, and shall not so long as a French ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... in a dangerous, captious, and ensnaring manner—that CALAMITY might be involved therein. Observe, for example, the indefatigable, inevitable English utilitarians: how ponderously and respectably they stalk on, stalk along (a Homeric metaphor expresses it better) in the footsteps of Bentham, just as he had already stalked in the footsteps of the respectable Helvetius! (no, he was not a dangerous man, Helvetius, CE SENATEUR POCOCURANTE, to use an expression of Galiani). No new thought, nothing of the nature ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... for the rank and file. They conserve unity. From the totem pole to the national flag, from the wooden idol to God the Invisible King, from the magic word to some diluted version of Adam Smith or Bentham, symbols have been cherished by leaders, many of whom were themselves unbelievers, because they were focal points where differences merged. The detached observer may scorn the "star-spangled" ritual which hedges the symbol, perhaps as much as the king who told himself that Paris ...
— Public Opinion • Walter Lippmann
... the hermit, "what else? 'Jeremy Bentham,' a new work; Ricardo, another book on economy; Southey the Laureate, 'Life of Nelson.' Really, Mr. Young might have known that naval deeds have no joy for me, hardly more than for you, Renny," smiling grimly on his servant. "'Edinburgh ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... list of the men of genius who were celibates. I will mention a few of those with whom the English-speaking world is most familiar: Kant, Newton, Pitt, Fox, Beethoven, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Gray, Dalton, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Lamb, Bentham, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Reynolds, Handel, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Schopenhauer, Camoens, and Voltaire. La Bruyere says of men of genius: "These men have neither ancestors nor descendants; they themselves ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... partisanship—plausible or not plausible. It is his own overture that warrants us in expecting this. And yet, before we have travelled three measured inches, he is found entangling himself with Church of Englandism. Let me not be misunderstood, as though, borrowing a Bentham word, I were therefore a Jerry Benthamite: I, that may describe myself generally as Philo-Phil., am not less a son of the 'Reformed Anglican Church' than Phil. Consequently, it is not likely that, in any vindication of that church, simply as such, ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v1 • Thomas de Quincey
... the nineteenth century, some would find a guiding thread in the progress of the Utilitarian School, which based its teaching on the idea of pursuing the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the school which produced philosophers like Bentham and J. S. Mill, and politicians like Cobden and Morley. It was congenial to the English mind to follow a line which seemed to lead with certainty to practical results; and the industrial revolutions caused men at this time to look, ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore |
