Crimes and Punishments

Excerpt: '‘All men, whether singly or collectively, naturally do wrong, nor is there any law which will prevent it. For every kind of punishment has been successively tried by mankind, if haply they might suffer less injury from malefactors. And it is probable that in their origin punishments for even the gravest crimes are comparatively mild, but that, as they are disregarded, most of them come in course of time to be punishments of death; yet this in its turn is also disregarded. Either, therefore, some greater terror than death must be invented, or death at least serves not as a deterrent, men being led to risk it, sometimes by poverty, which emboldens them through necessity, sometimes by power, which makes them overreaching and insolent; or sometimes by some other circumstance which subordinates all a man’s passions to some one passion that is insuperable and dominant.… And it is simply impossible, and a very foolish idea, to think that, when human nature is firmly bent on doing anything, it can be deterred from it either by force of law or by any other terror.’—Thucydides. ‘How many condemnations have I seen more criminal than the crimes themselves!’—Montaigne.'