A Quote by Jean de la Bruyere

The punishment of a criminal is an example to the rabble; but every decent man is concerned if an innocent person is condemned.

Jean de la Bruyere

Quote Topics

Concerned Condemned Decent Decent Man Every Example Innocent Innocent Person Man Person Punishment Rabble

Quote Author

Jean de la Bruyere
French - Philosopher
1645 - 1696

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

In existing criminology there are concepts: a criminal man, a criminal profession, a criminal society, a criminal sect, and a criminal tribe, but there is no concept of a criminal state, or a criminal government, or criminal legislation. Consequently what is often regarded as "political" activity is in fact a criminal activity.

P.D. Ouspensky

A guilty man is punished as an example for the mob; an innocent man convicted is the business of every honest citizen.

Jean de la Bruyere

Capital punishment? It makes no sense as a policy: It's not a deterrent, and economically it's a disaster. It's very clear that there are innocent people on death row. And if I put an innocent person to death, that's murder.

Tony Goldwyn

Of one thing, however, I am certain. Just as an execution without adequate safeguards is unacceptable, so too is an execution when the condemned prisoner can prove that he is innocent. The execution of a person who can show that he is innocent comes perilously close to simple murder.

Harry A. Blackmun

Education is about inviting every single person who enters a school to realize his or her relatively boundless potential in all areas of worthwhile human endeavor. It is concerned with more than grades, attendance, and academic achievement. It is concerned with the process of becoming a decent and productive human being.

William Watson Purkey

I have heard that it was the perfection of the administration of criminal justice to take care that the punishment should come to few and the example to many.

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon

The nature of the criminal justice system has changed. It is no longer primarily concerned with the prevention and punishment of crime, but rather with the management and control of the dispossessed.

Michelle Alexander

He’s bound to have done something,” Nobby repeated. In this he was echoing the Patrician’s view of crime and punishment. If there was a crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done.

Terry Pratchett

For years I supported capital punishment, but I have come to believe that our criminal justice system is incapable of adequately distinguishing between the innocent and guilty. It is reprehensible and immoral to gamble with life and death.

James Frey

Experience shows that the frequent use of severe punishment has never rendered a people better. The death of a criminal is a less effective means of restraining crimes than the permanent example of a man deprived of his liberty during the whole of his life to make amends for the injury he has done to the public.

Catherine the Great

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Walter Savage Landor

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

Ernst Junger

Where princes are concerned, a man who is able to do good is as dangerous and almost as criminal as a man who intends to do evil.

Jean Francois Paul de Gondi

Frankenstein took some flesh and bones and blood and made a man out of them; the man ran away and fell to raping and robbing and murdering everywhere, and Frankenstein was horrified and in despair, and said, I made him, without asking his consent, and it makes me responsible for every crime he commits. I am the criminal, he is innocent.