The great freethinkers of the Enlightenment all lived up to their statements of questioning authority and being themselves. Nearly all of them had got at last one quirk. Voltaire was both imprisoned and exiled from France, but that didn't hinder him from drinking his daily fifty cups of coffee. Another caffeine addict was Voltaire's patron, Frederick the Great, who preferred it boiled on champagne instead of water. But when it comes to quirks, it's London-born utilitarian Jeremy Bentham who takes the cake:
This slightly eccentric sacred monster has actually done a lot for our present-day quality of life: he defended the rights of women, children, foreigners, animals, and other outsiders come hell or highwater. Jeremy Bentham was also a wordsmith equal to Shakespeare and Carroll (as watchers of this clip will discover), and his doctrines have influenced John Stuart Mill (and, via Mill, the author of this blog). The utilitarian golden rule "to act not to hurt oneself or others, or at least to act to hurt as few people as possible", has become one of my personal creeds, aside from the basis of the law in the present-day Western world.
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