Hobbes, Thomas

A seventeenth-century British political philosopher ; the author of Leviathan . According to Hobbes, human life in a “state of nature” is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” He argued that government must be strong, even repressive, to keep people from lapsing into a savage existence.

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We could fill this page with quotations to similar effect from Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and others, if it weren't too tedious.

So says Thomas Hobbes, whose definition of all laughter illuminates those moments when we smugly parade past the shrunken giants.

We privately hate Mr. Thomas Hobbes, of Malmsbury; we know much evil of him, and we could expose many of his tricks effectually.

In Paris he assisted Thomas Hobbes in drawing diagrams for his treatise on optics.

Last in time among political philosophers before the middle of the century we find the greatest and most famous, Thomas Hobbes.

Neither Thomas Hobbes nor his typesetters seem to have had many inhibitions about spelling and punctuation.

Thomas Hobbes was still living among his learned friends in the French capital.

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