Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way to the common feelings of mankind.
Interpretation
This quote suggests that when the punishment for an offense is viewed as more horrifying than the offense itself, society will feel compelled to adjust the severity of the law.
Edward Gibbon's quote reflects the ethical dilemma where the severity of legal punishments can sometimes overshadow the nature of the crimes they are meant to address. It indicates a societal instinct to question and potentially reform laws when they clash with common human empathy and moral sensibilities, suggesting that justice must resonate with the feelings of humanity rather than adhere strictly to punitive measures.
In practice
A judge reflecting on legal reforms during a speech on ethics.
It was Rome, on the fifteenth of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol, while the barefooted friars were singing vespers in the Temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the city first started to my mind.
I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom, and, perhaps, the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind, by the idea that I had taken an everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatsoever might be the future date of my History, the life of the historian must be short and precarious.
And the winds and the waves are always on the side of the ablest navigators.
The first and indispensable requisite of happiness is a clear conscience.
In discussing Barbarism and Christianity I have actually been discussing the Fall of Rome.
Many a sober Christian would rather admit that a wafer is God than that God is a cruel and capricious tyrant.
But when the group is literally capable of changing our perceptions, and when to stand alone is to activate primitive, powerful, and unconscious feelings of rejection, then the health of these institutions seems far more vulnerable than we think.
He is a hypocrite who professes what he does not believe; not he who does not practice all he wishes or approves.
I may err but I am not a heretic, for the first has to do with the mind and the second with the will!
Silence has many dimensions. It can be a regression and an escape, a loss of self, or it can be presence, awareness, unification, self-discovery. Negative silence blurs and confuses our identity, and we lapse into daydreams or diffuse anxieties. Positive silence pulls us together and makes us realize who we are, who we might be, and the distance between these two.
The rhythm of the weekend, with its birth, its planned gaiety, and its announced end, followed the rhythm of life and was a substitute for it.
Arithmetic is where the answer is right and everything is nice and you can look out of the window and see the blue sky - or the answer is wrong and you have to start over and try again and see how it comes out this time.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.