“In sum, all actions and habits are to be esteemed good or evil by their causes and usefulness in reference to the commonwealth, and not by their mediocrity, nor by their being commended. For several men praise several customs, and, contrarily, what one calls vice, another calls virtue, as their present affections lead them.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Virtue
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“And I profess still, that whatsoever the church of England (the church, I say, not every doctor) shall forbid me to say in matter of faith, I shall abstain from saying it, excepting this point, that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, died for my sins. As for other doctrines, I think it unlawful, if the church define them, for any member of the church to contradict them.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“And consequently when wee Believe that the Scriptures are the word of God, having no immediate revelation from God himself, our Belief, Faith, and Trust is in the Church; whose words we take, and acquiesce therein.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“The Scripture was written to shew unto men the kingdom of God; and to prepare their minds to become his obedient subjects; leaving the world, and the Philosophy thereof, to the disputation of men, for the exercising of their natural Reason.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“For it is with the mysteries of our religion, as with wholesome pills for the sick, which swallowed whole, have the virtue to cure; but chewed, are for the most part cast up again without effect.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Religion
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“If God bestowed immortality on every man then when he made him, and he made many to whom he never purposed to give his saving grace, what did his Lordship think that God gave any man immortality with purpose only to make him capable of immortal torments? It is a hard saying, and I think cannot piously be believed. I am sure it can never be proved by the canonical Scripture.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Immortality
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“Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of War, 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 withal. In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain; and consequently no Culture of the Earth…; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
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“For WAR, consisteth not in Battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the Will to content by Battle is sufficiently known…. So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
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“To this war of every man against every man, this also is consequent; that nothing can be Unjust. The notions of Right and Wrong, Justice and Injustice have there no place. Where there is no common Power, there is no Law; where no Law, no Injustice. Force, and Fraud, are in war the two Cardinal virtues.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: War
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“To speak impartially, both sayings are very true: that man to man is a kind of God; and that man to man is an arrant wolf. The first is true, if we compare citizens amongst themselves; and the second, if we compare cities.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“They that are discontented under monarchy, call it tyranny; and they that are displeased with aristocracy, call it oligarchy: so also, they which find themselves grieved under a democracy, call it anarchy, which signifies the want of government; and yet I think no man believes, that want of government, is any new kind of government.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“The Pacts and Covenants, by which the parts of this Body Politique were at first made, set together, and united, resemble that Fiat, or the Let us make man, pronounced by God in the Creation.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“The Imagination that is raised in man (or any other creature imbued with the faculty of imagining) by words, or other voluntary signs, is that we generally call Understanding; and is common to Man and Beasts.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“It is manifest therefore that they who have sovereign power, are immediate rulers of the church under Christ, and all others but subordinate to them. If that were not, but kings should command one thing upon pain of death, and priests another upon pain of damnation, it would be impossible that peace and religion should stand together.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Government
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“A man’s conscience and his judgement is the same thing; and as the judgement, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Conscience
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“If in time, as in place, there were degrees of high and low, I verily believe that the highest of time would be that which passed between the years of 1640 and 1660. For he that thence, as from the Devil’s Mountain, should have looked upon the world and observed the actions of men, especially in England, might have had a prospect of all kinds of injustice, and of all kinds of folly, that the world could afford, and how they were produced by their dams hypocrisy and self-conceit, whereof the one is double iniquity, and the other double folly.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“For if I should not believe all that is written by Historians, of the glorious acts of Alexander, or Caesar; I do not think the Ghost of Alexander, or Caesar, had any just cause to be offended; or any body else, but the Historian. If Livy say the Gods made once a Cow speak, and we believe it not; we distrust not God therein, but Livy. So that it is evident, that whatsoever we believe, upon no other reason, then what is drawn from authority of men only, and their writings; whether they be sent from God or not, is Faith in men only.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: History
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“He has not yet found the place where I contradict either the existence, or infiniteness, or incomprehensibility, or unity, or ubiquity of God. I am therefore yet absolved of atheism. But I am, he says, inconsistent and irreconcilable with myself; that is, I am (though he says it not) he thinks, a forgetful blockhead. I cannot help that: but my forgetfulness appears not here.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Atheism
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“But they that hold God to be [an incorporeal substance] … do absolutely make God to be nothing at all. But how? Were they atheists? No. For though by ignorance of the consequence they said that which was equivalent to atheism, yet in their hearts they thought God a substance … So that this atheism by consequence is a very easy thing to be fallen into, even by the most godly men of the church.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Atheism
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“To conclude, The Light of humane minds is Perspicuous Words, but by exact definitions first snuffed, and purged from ambiguity; Reason is the pace; Encrease of Science, the way; and the Benefit of man-kind, the end.”
Thomas Hobbes
Submitted by Quonation |Category: Science
