Thomas Hobbes

“He that is taken and put into prison or chains is not conquered, though overcome; for he is still an enemy.”

“A wise man should so write (though in words understood by all men) that wise men only should be able to commend him.”

“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.”

“The Papacy is not other than the Ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.”

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

“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.”

“Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselv...”

“The disembodied spirit is immortal; there is nothing of it that can grow old or die. But the embodied spirit sees death on the horizon as soon as its day dawns.”

“The flesh endures the storms of the present alone; the mind, those of the past and future as well as the present. Gluttony is a lust of the mind.”

“The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.”

“Not believing in force is the same as not believing in gravitation.”

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

“Fear of things invisible in the natural seed of that which everyone in himself calleth religion.”

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

“Sudden glory is the passion which maketh those grimaces called laughter.”

“There is no such thing as perpetual tranquillity of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.”

“No man's error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.”

“Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.”

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