Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher and political theorist. One of the seminal figures of British empiricism, his major works, Leviathan (1651) and De Homine (1658,) expressed his principle of materialism and his concept of a social contract forming the basis of society.
Born in Westport, Wiltshire, Hobbes argued, “During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.” Human submission to sovereign authority is influenced by materialism and self-interest, and that temporal power is superior to ecclesiastical power. Fear of death and the need for security are the psychological foundations both of worldly prudence and of civilization itself.
In 1666, Hobbes’s enemies in the clergy declared that the Plague and the Great Fire of London of 1665–66 revealed God’s wrath against England for harboring an atheist in Hobbes. The British Parliament wanted Hobbes’s Leviathan to be investigated for atheist tendencies. Hobbes was terrified of being branded a heretic—he burned many of his papers and decided to avoid publishing anything on overtly political subjects in the future. King Charles II, whom Hobbes had tutored earlier in life, interceded on his behalf and quashed the motion.
Hobbes’s theories of the social contract were explored and reformulated by such later political theorists as John Locke, Baruch Spinoza, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes contributed to history, jurisprudence, geometry, theology, ethics, and the physics of gases.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thomas Hobbes
It is not wisdom but Authority that makes a law.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Authority, One liners
There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility 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.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: The Mind
Sudden glory is the passion which makes those grimaces called laughter.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Glory
Words are wise men’s counters, they do but reckon by them: but they are the money of fools.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Words
Curiosity is the lust of the mind.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Curiosity
The privilege of absurdity; to which no living creature is subject, but man only.
—Thomas Hobbes
Understanding is nothing else than conception caused by speech.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Understanding
Words are the counters of wise men, and the money of fools.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Words
Covenants, without the sword, are but words, and of no strength to secure a man at all. The bonds of words are too weak to bridle man’s ambition, avarice, anger, and other passions, without the fear of some coercive power.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Words
Appetite, with an opinion of attaining, is called hope; the same, without such opinion, despair.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Hope, Desires
The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Praise, Books
Prudence is but experience, which equal time, equally bestows on all men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Caution
Force, and fraud, are in war the two cardinal virtues.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: War
Had I read as much as others, I had remained as ignorant as they.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Reading
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.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Conflict
No mans error becomes his own Law; nor obliges him to persist in it.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Mistakes
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
Topics: Religion
The original of all great and lasting societies consisted not in the mutual good will men had toward each other, but in the mutual fear they had of each other.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Fear
Leisure is the mother of philosophy.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Philosophy, Leisure, Rest
Obligation is thraldom, and thraldom is hateful.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Obligation
A man’s conscience and his judgment is the same thing; and as the judgment, so also the conscience, may be erroneous.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Conscience
Fear of things invisible is the natural seed of that which every one in himself calleth religion.
—Thomas Hobbes
There are few who need complain of the narrowness of their minds if they will only do their best with them.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Mind
Desire to know why, and how—curiosity, which is a lust of the mind, that a perseverance of delight in the continued and indefatigable generation of knowledge—exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: The Mind, Knowledge, Curiosity
Laughter is nothing else but a sudden glory arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others, or with our own formerly.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Laughter
The secret thoughts of a man run over all things, holy, profane, clean, obscene, grave, and light, without shame or blame.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Secrets
I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Last Words, Famous Last Words
Our nature is inseparable from desires, and the very word desire—the craving for something not possessed—implies that our present felicity is not complete.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Desire
Science is the knowledge of consequences, and dependence of one fact upon another.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Scientists, Science
Faith is a gift of God which man can neither give nor take away by promise of rewards or menaces of torture.
—Thomas Hobbes
Topics: Faith, Belief
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
John Locke English Philosopher
Francis Bacon English Philosopher
Baruch Spinoza Dutch Philosopher
Rene Descartes French Mathematician, Philosopher
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz German Philosopher, Mathematician
Niccolo Machiavelli Florentine Political Philosopher
Jeremy Bentham British Philosopher, Economist
Aristotle Ancient Greek Philosopher
David Hume Scottish Philosopher, Historian
Montesquieu French Political Philosopher