💬 Quotes

"During the time men live without a common Power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man."

"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of Warre, where every man is Enemy to every man; the same is consequent to the time, wherein men live without other security, than what their own strength, and their own invention shall furnish them with."

"In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation... no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continual feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short."

"Covenants, without the Sword, are but Words, and of no strength to secure a man at all."

"The Passions that incline men to Peace, are: Fear of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their industry to obtain them."

"A Commonwealth is one Person, whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their Peace and Common Defence."

"To the Greek, striving for the middle life, the ideal is not 'Be perfect,' but 'Be temperate.'"

"Plato is the father of idealism; but it is an idealism born, not of abstraction, but of a deeply stirred emotional experience."

"That Heraclitean flux, the 'perpetual motion' of things, is the primary truth of experience."

"Art, poetry, music—these are not merely recreations for the citizen, but the very atmosphere in which the soul learns to love the beautiful and the true."

"With Plato, to know is to remember; all true knowledge is a reminiscence of that brighter world in which the soul once walked."

"The Republic is before all things a-mused; it is a search after the true commonwealth, built not with hands, but in the ideal architecture of the human mind."

"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 action then may be said to be conformable to then principle of utility... when the tendency it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any it has to diminish it."

"Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry, if the game of push-pin furnishes more pleasure."

"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."

"A measure of government... may be said to be conformable to or dictated by the principle of utility, when in like manner the tendency which it has to augment the happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to diminish it."

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

"Anarchism stands for the liberation of the human mind from the dominion of religion; the liberation of the human body from the dominion of property; liberation from the shackles and restraint of government."

"True emancipation begins neither at the polls nor in courts. It begins in woman's soul."