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.
The judge is found guilty when a criminal is acquitted.
Oftentimes I deliberately put ambiguity into my books so that... the reader is left with an echo of: 'How much of this was from me?'
For the birds there is not a time that they tell, but the point vierge between darkness and light, between being and nonbeing. You can tell yourself the time by their waking, if you are experienced. But that is your folly, not theirs.
You are an infinite spiritual being having a temporary human experience.
I believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish; where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the Pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source; where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials; and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
Is there no way out of the mind?
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