Quote of the day
Words are wise men's counters, they do but reckon by them; but they are the money of fools.
Thomas Hobbes’s philosophical argument in Leviathan, Part I, chapter IV, Of Speech, published in London in 1651; the sentence’s precise circumstances of composition are unknown.
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Instruments, not valuables
Hobbes’s comparison turns on two different kinds of value. Counters help someone calculate; money is itself accepted as valuable. For the careful thinker, words are instruments of reasoning. For the foolish, they acquire an unearned worth merely because an eminent authority has used them.
The surrounding argument concerns definitions. If the meanings of words are muddled at the outset, errors accumulate as reasoning proceeds. Hobbes therefore asks readers to examine earlier writers’ terminology rather than inherit it unquestioningly. Intellectual pedigree, however distinguished, cannot perform the work of clear thought.
What the shortened sentence leaves out
The omitted continuation names Aristotle, Cicero and other learned authorities, sharpening the criticism of deference. Yet this is no dismissal of language or scholarship. In the same chapter, Hobbes presents speech as indispensable to knowledge, cooperation and political society: the instrument is essential, but its handling requires care.
These are Hobbes’s own expository words, not a fictional character’s remark or a recorded public address. He wrote Leviathan late in his Paris exile; the book was printed for Andrew Crooke in London in 1651. Its publication place does not establish where this particular sentence was composed.
Clear language and civil peace
Thomas Hobbes, born near Malmesbury in Wiltshire in 1588, was educated at Oxford and spent much of his working life with the Cavendish family. His intellectual range extended beyond politics to language, mind and matter; he also translated Thucydides into English and, later, Homer.
His place in Britain’s intellectual history rests especially on Leviathan. Against the background of civil war, it developed an influential social-contract argument for undivided sovereign authority capable of securing peace. Later thinkers could reject his conclusions without escaping the questions he posed. This compact observation reveals a complementary concern: political reasoning needs verbal precision, not merely impressive vocabulary.