Cesare Beccaria Quotes

• 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

  218 Copy quote

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

  Cesare Beccaria

  Punishment, Crime, Certainty

  231 Copy quote

• 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

  199 Copy quote

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

  Cesare Beccaria

  Law, Weapons, Crime

  131 Copy quote

• 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

  218 Copy quote

• 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

  147 Copy quote

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

  Cesare Beccaria

  Children, Childhood, Faults

  90 Copy quote

• 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

  96 Copy quote

• 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.

  81 Copy quote

• 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

  33 Copy quote

• 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

  66 Copy quote

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