Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.
Interpretation
Punishing one wrongdoer does not prevent others from committing similar offenses.
H. L. Mencken's quote suggests that the act of punishing or executing one individual who has done wrong does little to prevent future wrongdoings by others. It reflects a cynical view of justice, implying that although one criminal may be removed from society, new ones will inevitably arise, questioning the effectiveness of punitive measures in deterring crime overall.
In practice
In a discussion about the effectiveness of the death penalty as a deterrent.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
It takes a long while for a naturally trustful person to reconcile himself to the idea that after all God will not help him
It is the theory of all modern civilized governments that they protect and foster the liberty of the citizen; it is the practice of all of them to limit its exercise, and sometimes very narrowly.
The central belief of every moron is that he is the victim of a mysterious conspiracy against his common rights and true deserts.
The cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy.
It is my conviction that no normal man ever fell in love, within the ordinary meaning of the term, after the age of thirty.
What a life! True life is elsewhere. We are not in the world.
The act of vagabonding is not an isolated trend so much as it is a spectral connection between people long separated by place and time, but somehow speaking the same language.
I don't think any of us really knows why we're here. But I think we're supposed to believe we're here for a purpose.
The use of a mere dozen nuclear weapons ... would be a human catastrophe without parallel. ... Because so few weapons can kill so many people, even far-reaching disarmament proposals would leave us implicated in plans for unprecedented slaughter of innocent people. The sole measure that can free us from this burden is abolition.
The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest-for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both-must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story.
I've never been interested enough to have a career trajectory. I've never had any ambition or thought of what I should be doing or had any idea of what I'd like to do. Never. And still don't. And if something comes along, I say 'Fine.'
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