“Let the punishment match the offense.”

— Marcus Tullius Cicero , book De Legibus

Book III, section 11
De Legibus (On the Laws)

Original

Noxia poena par esto.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Let the punishment match the offense." by Marcus Tullius Cicero?

Marcus Tullius Cicero photo

Marcus Tullius Cicero 180

Roman philosopher and statesman -106–-43 BC

Related quotes

“Let no one dare to call another mad who is not himself willing to rank in the same class for every perversion and fault of judgment. Let no one dare aid in punishing another as criminal who is not willing to suffer the penalty due to his own offenses.”

Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) American feminist, poet, author, and activist

Article, The New York Daily Tribune (22 February 1845), p. 19; quoted in Brilliant Bylines (1986) by Barbara Belford.

“There's a group in California that wants to make suicide a capital offense punishable by death. That's like punishing somebody for being on a hunger strike by sending them to bed with no supper.”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Now That's Awesome (2000)

“Of the ten crimes which Biblical Hebrew law punished by stoning, nine have ceased to be offenses in modern society.”

Joseph Lewis (1889–1968) American activist

The Ten Commandments ("The Eighth Commandment")

“The well understood equity as well as interest of society demand that we work on much more to prevent crime and offenses than to punish them.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 52.

“My object all sublime
I shall achieve in time—
To let the punishment fit the crime,
The punishment fit the crime.”

W. S. Gilbert (1836–1911) English librettist of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo

The Mikado (1885)

“But this is not to say that the society which inflicts capital punishment commits murder. Murder is an offensive act. The term cannot be applied legitimately to any defensive act. And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act,—at least in theory.”

Benjamin Ricketson Tucker (1854–1939) American journalist and anarchist

Individual Liberty (1926), Anarchism and Capital Punishment

“The wicked do not fear God from any unwillingness to offend him, provided they could do so with impunity. … But believers, as has been said, dread the offense even more than the punishment.”

John Calvin book Institutes of the Christian Religion

Book 3, Chapter 2, Section 27, p. 480
Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536; 1559)

“If the clan did not exact punishment for an offense against the great goddess, her wrath was loosed on all the land and not just on the offender. As the elders said, if one finger brought oil it soiled all the others.”

Chinua Achebe book Things Fall Apart

Source: Things Fall Apart (1958), Chapter 13 (p. 118)

“Don't punish yourselves for people's ignorant reactions to what we all are. Don't let ignorance win. Let love.”

Nancy Garden book Annie on My Mind

Source: Annie on My Mind

“I take it that the judgment is an essential point in every conviction, let the punishment be fixed or not.”

Lloyd Kenyon, 1st Baron Kenyon (1732–1802) British Baron

King v. Harris (1797), 7 T. R. 239.

Related topics