A Quote by Oliver Goldsmith

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Oliver Goldsmith

Quote Topics

Generally Punish Themselves

Quote Author

Oliver Goldsmith
Irish - Novelist
November 10, 1730 - April 4, 1774

People who commit crimes are generally reluctant to tell on themselves.

Jason Whitlock

Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men — and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort — as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Companies do not commit crimes; only their agents do. And while a company might get the benefit of some such crimes, prosecuting the company would inevitably punish, directly or indirectly, the many employees and shareholders who were totally innocent.

Jed S. Rakoff

Governors being accustomed to hear of more crimes than they can punish, and more wrongs than they can redress, set themselves at ease by indiscriminate negligence, and presently forget the request when they lose sight of the petitioner.

Samuel Johnson

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.

Thomas More

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

Cesare Beccaria

[W]hich category of crimes does the State pursue and punish most intensely? [T]hose against private citizens or those against itself? The gravest crimes in the State's lexicon are almost invariably not invasions of private person or property, but dangers to its own contentment, for example, treason, desertion of a soldier to the enemy, failure to register for the draft, subversion and subversive conspiracy, assassination of rulers and such economic crimes against the State as counterfeiting its money or evasion of its income tax.

Murray Rothbard

The object of a bunker or trap is not only to punish a physical mistake, to punish lack of control, but also to punish pride and egotism.

Charles B. Macdonald

There is no more fundamental axiom of American freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.

Harry S. Truman

You should punish in the same manner those who commit crimes with those who accuse falsely.

Thucydides

Humans punish themselves endlessly for not being what they believe they should be. They become very self-abusive, and they use other people to abuse themselves as well.

Miguel Angel Ruiz

People have suffered and become insane for centuries by the thought of eternal punishment after death. Wouldn't it be better to depend on blind matter... than a god who puts out traps for people, invites them to sin, and allows them to sin and commit crimes he could prevent. Only to finally get the barbarian pleasure to punish them in an excessive way, of no use for himself, without them changing their ways and without their example preventing others from committing crimes.

Baron d'Holbach

It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

The "prophets" were what we would call dissident intellectuals. They provided critical geopolitical analysis, condemned the crimes of the powerful, called for justice and mercy for those who needed help, etc. I wouldn't personally endorse everything they said, any more than I would for critics of power and its crimes today. But rather generally I think they played an honorable role - and suffered accordingly.

Noam Chomsky

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.