Happy is the nation without a history.

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.

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.

Everybody’s youth is a dream, a form of chemical madness.

I was a film-directing major at NYU. I'm still not sure why I became a directing major, when I was really an actor and a comedian, but there was something that drew me to doing that.

I've done enough films to know how to save up my energy for the take and then give it on the take and do that.

My tendency to internalize emotion is probably why I'm an actor. I'm comfortable performing angrily but have such difficulty expressing anger in my life.

I've never done a superhero movie. It's very nice to you as an actor in several worlds to go and to experiment.

"My father," she admitted, "was of Italian extraction. Unfortunately, not an affliction that can be cured." She paused. "Though he did die."

War is now a form of TV entertainment, and what made the First World War so particularly entertaining were two American inventions, barbed wire and the machine gun.

Being-alone is a deficient mode of being-with; its possibility is a proof for the latter.

But it was an ending.

People live by example. I can't tell you, "You can be anything," if I shot my own dreams down or was too afraid to go after them.