UPSC Express

Thomas Hobbes

Leisure is the mother of philosophy.

I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.

Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues.

The condition of man… is a condition of war of everyone against everyone.

The obligation of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.

A man’s conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.

Curiosity is the lust of the mind.

Words are the money of fools.

The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject but man only.

Such truth as opposeth no man’s profit nor pleasure is to all men welcome.

It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The right of nature… is the liberty each man hath to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own nature; that is to say, of his own life.

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.

No mans error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.

Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon with them, but they are the money of fools.

All generous minds have a horror of what are commonly called “Facts”. They are the brute beasts of the intellectual domain.

Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.

War consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known.

In the state of nature profit is the measure of right.