Cesare Beccaria Quotes

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

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

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

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

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

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

Happy is the nation without a history.

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.

happy is the nation without a history

The greatest happiness of the greatest number.

I myself owe everything to French books. They developed in my soul the sentiments of humanity which had been stifled by eight years of fanatical and servile education.