A Quote by Adam Smith

Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the innocent.

Adam Smith

Quote Topics

Cruelty Guilty Innocent Mercy

Quote Author

Adam Smith
Scottish - Economist
June 5, 1723 - July 17, 1790

It's not about whether you are innocent or guilty. It's about whether or not you can prove you're innocent. If you can't prove you're innocent, then you're considered guilty. It's been flipped: Now it's guilty until proven innocent.

Ronald Jones

Do not be merciful, but be just, for mercy is bestowed upon the guilty criminal, while Justice is all that the innocent man requires.

Khalil Gibran

Just as the liar 's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed , but that he cannot believe any one else; so a guilty society can more easily be persuaded that any apparently innocent act is guilty than that any apparently guilty act is innocent.

George Bernard Shaw

A new theory is guilty until proven innocent, and the pre-existing theory innocent until proven guilty ... Continental drift was guilty until proven innocent.

David M. Raup

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses.

Malcolm X

An innocent man, if accused, can be acquitted; a guilty man, unless accused, cannot be condemned. It is, however, more advantageous to absolve an innocent than not to prosecute a guilty man.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

A day of grace is yet held out to us. Both North and South have been guilty before God; and the Christian Church has a heavy account to answer. Not by combining together, to protest injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved-but by repentance, justice and mercy; for, not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of Almighty God.

Harriet Beecher Stowe

When one acts on pity against justice, it is the good whom one punishes for the sake of the evil; when one saves the guilty from suffering, it is the innocent whom one forces to suffer. There is no escape from justice, nothing can be unearned and unpaid for in the universe, neither in matter nor in spirit—and if the guilty do not pay, then the innocent have to pay it.

Ayn Rand

Whether life finds us guilty or not guilty, we ourselves know we are not innocent.

Sándor Márai

You know, in Saudi Arabia, you're innocent until proven Jewish. Female. Guilty! They're guilty!

Jon Stewart

There's a reason survivors choose not to go to the police, and that's because they're treated as the criminals. The rapists are innocent until proven guilty, but survivors are guilty until proven innocent - at least in the eyes of the police.

Emma Sulkowicz

Ladies and gentlemen, Im going to prove to you not only that Freddy Quimby is guilty, but that he is also innocent of not being guilty

Lionel

It's daft, locking us up," said Nanny. "I'd have had us killed." "That's because you're basically good," said Magrat. "The good are innocent and create justice. The bad are guilty, which is why they invent mercy.

Terry Pratchett

[This is] the basis of the Innocent Woman Defense the Innocent Woman Principle:;: Women are believed when they say they are innocent of violence and most easily doubted when they say they are guilty of violence.

Warren Farrell

Cheery was aware that Commander Vimes didn't like the phrase 'The innocent have nothing to fear', believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like 'The innocent have nothing to fear'.

Terry Pratchett

I come from the liberal side of thinking: Better one guilty man should walk free than one innocent man found guilty.