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.
We believe in separation of church and state, that there should be no unwarranted influence on the church or religion by the state, and vice versa.
So you cannot, as a Christian, walk away from Africa.
What is the sound of one hand?
We do not live in several different, or even two different, worlds, a mental world and a physical world, a scientific world and a world of common sense. Rather, there is just one world; it is the world we all live in, and we need to account for how we exist as part of it.
It wasn't until I had performed by first autopsy that I realized that even the drabest human exteriors could contain the most beautiful viscera. After that, I would console myself for the plainness of my fellow bus-riders by dissecting them in my imagination.
It is exceedingly difficult to maintain a sense of absence without turning that absence into some kind of presence
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.