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Cesare Beccaria Quotes

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

Cesare Beccaria
Crime, Pragmatism
Cesare Beccaria (2016). “On Crimes and Punishments”, p.107, Transaction Publishers

Crimes are more effectually prevented by the certainty than the severity of punishment

Cesare Beccaria
Punishment, Crime, Certainty

For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes.

Cesare Beccaria
Men, Crime, Intensity
Cesare Beccaria (1963). “On Crimes and Punishments”, Pearson College Division

Laws against the possession of weapons only disarm those who have no intention of committing a crime.

Cesare Beccaria
Law, Weapons, Crime

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity...will respect the less important and arbitrary ones... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants, they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Cesare Beccaria
Men, Gun, Law

The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful.

Cesare Beccaria
War, Punishment, Judging
Cesare Beccaria (marchese di) (1963). “On crimes and punishments”, Bobbs-Merrill Company

The fault no child ever loses is the one he was most punished for.

Cesare Beccaria
Children, Childhood, Faults

False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men because it burns, and water because one may drown in it; that has no remedy for evils except destruction. The laws that forbid the carrying of arms are laws of such a nature. They disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes.

Cesare Beccaria
Real, Sacrifice, Men
Cesare Beccaria (1963). “On Crimes and Punishments”, Pearson College Division

Happy is the nation without a history.

Cesare Beccaria
Rehabilitation, Nations
"Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations" by Jehiel Keeler Hoyt, p. 368-69, Trattato dei Delitti e delle Pene, 1922.

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms... serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.

Cesare Beccaria
Men, Law, May

For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the minor, the action that conforms or does not conform to the law; and the conclusion, acquittal or punishment. If the judge were constrained, or if he desired to frame even a single additional syllogism, the door would thereby be opened to uncertainty.

Cesare Beccaria
Doors, Law, Punishment
Cesare Beccaria (1963). “On Crimes and Punishments”, Pearson College Division

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