The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations Preface

2.88 Ada Benson and Fred Fisher 1875-1942
Your feet’s too big,
Don’t want you ’cause your feet’s too big,
Mad at you ’cause your feet’s too big,
Hates you ’cause your feet’s too big.
‘Your Feet’s Too Big’ (1936 song)
2.89 A. C. Benson 1862-1925
Land of Hope and Glory, Mother of the Free,
How shall we extol thee who are born of thee?
Wider still and wider shall thy bounds be set;
God who made thee mighty, make thee mightier yet.
‘Land of Hope and Glory’ written to be sung as the Finale of Elgar’s Coronation Ode (1902)
2.90 Stella Benson 1892-1933
Call no man foe, but never love a stranger.
‘This is the End’ (1917) p. 63
2.91 Jeremy Bentham 1748-1832
Right...is the child of law: from real laws come real rights; but from imaginary laws, from laws
of nature, fancied and invented by poets, rhetoricians, and dealers in moral and intellectual
poisons, come imaginary rights, a bastard brood of monsters.
‘Anarchical Fallacies’ in J. Bowring (ed.) ‘Works’ vol. 2, p. 501
Natural rights is simple nonsense: natural and imprescriptible rights, rhetorical nonsense—
nonsense upon stilts.
‘Anarchical Fallacies’ in J. Bowring (ed.) ‘Works’ vol. 2, p. 523
The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.
‘The Commonplace Book’ in J. Bowring (ed.) ‘Works’ vol. 10 (1843) p. 142, in which Bentham claims to
have acquired the ‘sacred truth’ either from Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) or Cesare Beccaria (1738-94).
The Fool had stuck himself up one day, with great gravity, in the King’s throne; with a stick,
by way of a sceptre, in one hand, and a ball in the other: being asked what he was doing? he
answered ‘reigning’. Much of the same sort of reign, I take it would be that of our Author’s
[Blackstone’s] Democracy.
‘A Fragment on Government’ (1776) ch. 2, para. 34, footnote (e)
All punishment is mischief: all punishment in itself is evil.
‘Principles of Morals and Legislation’ (1789) ch. 13, para. 2
Prose is when all the lines except the last go on to the end. Poetry is when some of them fall
short of it.
In M. St. J. Packe ‘The Life of John Stuart Mill’ (1954) bk. 1, ch. 2
He rather hated the ruling few than loved the suffering many.