Jeremy Bentham Quotes

If you have difficulties making a decision, choose the lesser of the two evils.

Calculated risks of abuse are taken in order to preserve higher values.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be either good or evil.

Let's put aside this argument over perfect protection and concentrate on getting a whole lot of protection for a whole lot of people.

The end must justify the means.

If you spend most of your effort preventing bad things from happening you will also prevent many good things from happening.

It is not necessary to have an entire certainty in regard to considerable goods and evils; mere possibility, and much more so probability, is sufficient to induce a reasonable person to deprive himself of some trifling good, and even to suffer some slight evil, with a design of acquiring a far greater good, and avoiding a more troublesome evil.

I have no right, for the sake of carrying a measure, or stirring up excitement, or swaying the popular opinion, to urge, as a matter of universal obligation, what God has left as a matter to be decided by every man’s conscience

We respond to the unknown by trying to retreat from it, or trying to comprehend it, or trying to control it. The first approach is evident in longings for return to a simpler "risk-free" life that never was. The second is reflected in the fantasy of synoptic risk assessment: Measure the requisite probabilities and trade-offs, calculate the social risk-benefit function, and the common good will have been defined. The third approach is in the tradition of professional engineering. It serves us well but, as engineers have been among the first to point out, has met its match and more in the complex social problems it increasingly is called upon to address.

… vice came in always at the door of necessity, not at the door of inclination.

In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit.

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

The lesser evil is also evil.

An injustice is tolerable only when it is necessary to avoid an even greater injustice.

For the lesser evil is reckoned a good in comparison with the greater evil, since the lesser evil is rather to be chosen than the greater. .

You cannot cure a lesser evil by a greater evil.

No human endeavour can ever be wholly good... it must always have a cost.

It is easy for most of us to keep our hands from picking and stealing when picking and stealing plainly lead to prison diet and prison garments. But when silks and satins come of it, and with the silks and satins general respect, the net result of honesty does not seem to be so secure.

The moment one begins to solder right and wrong together, one's conscience becomes like a piece of plated goods.

If you are picking the lesser of two evils, you are still picking Evil.

I must affirm that it is just as wrong, or perhaps even more so, to use moral means to preserve immoral ends.

Who would not rather be the sufferer than the defrauder?

The State not seldom tolerates a comparatively great evil to keep out millions of lesser ills and inconveniences which otherwise would be inevitable and without remedy.

You gotta learn the alphabet, backwards and forwards. And then the choice is yours, 'cause last I looked, the Bible is written in the same words, the exact same alphabet, as my favorite pornography. Choice is yours.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.