Controversial Sayings

Philosophy consists mostly of kicking up a lot of dust and then complaining that you can't see anything.

If geometry were as much opposed to our passions and present interests as is ethics, we should contest it and violate it but little less, notwithstanding all the demonstrations of Euclid and Archimedes.

The world is not a machine. Everything in it is force, life, thought.

If you could blow the brain up to the size of a mill and walk about inside, you would not find consciousness.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice; which the more man's nature runs to, the more ought law to weed it out.

Atheism leaves a man to sense, to philosophy, to natural piety, to laws, to reputation; all which may be guides to an outward moral virtue, though religion were not; but superstition dismounts all these, and erecteth an absolute monarchy in the minds…

Judges must beware of hard constructions and strained inferences, for there is no worse torture than that of laws.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

There is in human nature generally, more of the fool than of the wise; and therefore those faculties, by which the foolish part of men's minds is taken, are most potent.

A man's nature, runs either to herbs or weeds; therefore let him seasonably water the one, and destroy the other.

Imperial expansion is preferable to civil war, and that Britain is faced with something of a binary choice.

I like a plantation in a pure soil; that is, where people are not displanted to the end to plant in others; for else it is rather an extirpation than a plantation.

Conquest, acquisition of peoples and territory through force, followed by subjugation, confers a legal right and title.

Paradoxically, Bacon holds that the internally colonized may be treated with greater severity, as suppressed rebels, than the externally colonized, who are more fitly a subject of the ius gentium.

Power to do good is the true and lawful end of aspiring. For good thoughts (though God accept them) yet towards men are little better than good dreams, except they be put in act; and that cannot be without power and place, as the vantage and commandi…

Judges ought to remember that their office is jus dicere, and not jus dare; to interpret law, and not to make law, or give law. Else will it be like the authority, claimed by the Church of Rome, which under pretext of exposition of Scripture, doth no…

Laws are made to guard the rights of the people, not to feed the lawyers. The laws should be read by all, known to all. Put them into shape, inform them with philosophy, reduce them in bulk, give them into every man's hand.

What you are, you are by accident of birth; what I am, I am by myself. There are and will be a thousand princes; there is only one Beethoven.

Oh you people who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem so to you. From childhood on, my heart and mind were bent on kindly feelings, and I was e…

It was impossible for me to say to men speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.