False is the idea of utility that sacrifices a thousand real advantages for one imaginary or trifling inconvenience; that would take fire from men be…

- Cesare Beccaria

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms... serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater con…

- Cesare Beccaria

The laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that tho…

- Cesare Beccaria

It is better to prevent crimes than to punish them.

- Cesare Beccaria

Laws against the possession of weapons only disarm those who have no intention of committing a crime.

- Cesare Beccaria

For every crime that comes before him, a judge is required to complete a perfect syllogism in which the major premise must be the general law; the mi…

- Cesare Beccaria

For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes.

- Cesare Beccaria

The punishment of death is the war of a nation against a citizen whose destruction it judges to be necessary or useful.

- Cesare Beccaria

Happy is the nation without a history.

- Cesare Beccaria