Michel de Montaigne Quotes

If we started prosecuting people for sin, we’d all be in jail.

The light of lights looks always on the motive, not the deed, the shadow of shadows on the deed alone.

Our sense of fairness tells us that people should pay for the wrong they do.

Every person who is tempted to go astray does not deserve punishment

Politicians may do as they please, so long as they violate no rule of right, no principle of justice, no law of God; but in no world, in no order, or condition, have men the right to do wrong.

To judge … any man … simply from his own point of view, is weak and illogical. History judges the man from its point of view. It condemns or applauds the point of view itself. The point of view of a malefactor is not to excuse robbery and murder. Nor is the spirit of the age to be pleaded in favor of the evil-doer.

All judges had rather that ten innocent should suffer than that one guilty should escape

The law is not known, since there is nothing in it to know. We come across it only through its action, and it acts only through its sentence and its execution. It is not distinguishable from the application. We know it only through its imprint on our heart and our flesh: we are guilty, necessarily guilty. Guilt is like the moral thread which duplicates the thread of time.

Rather leave the crime of the guilty unpunished than condemn the innocent.

Then, in the next place, we must know that every being which is endowed with reason, and transgresses its statutes and limitations, is undoubtedly involved in sin by swerving from rectitude and justice.

Unless we provide consequences for activities and actions that are wrong, we are not going to get any truth.

In civilized life, law floats in a sea of ethics. Each is indispensable to civilization. Without law, we should be at the mercy of the least scrupulous; without ethics, law could not exist.

I would not hold that we must judge by the favorable or adverse result alone whether an undertaking was just or unjust.

The man who was excellent, I rewarded him well; who was evil, I punished him well.

Law is not self-executing. Unfortunately, at times its execution rests in the hands of those who are faithless to it. And even when its enforcement is committed to those who revere it, law merely deters some human beings from offending, and punishes other human beings for offending. This does not make men good. This task can be performed only by ethics or religion or morality.

Law alone cannot make men see right.

if you do countenance those that are transgressors of the law you are in the same fact.

Law is, for the most part, positive or mandatory. It prescribes certain duties which I am to do as the condition of my civic protection. Conscience is, for the most part, negative or prohibitory in its operation. It sets before me certain evils to be undone or repented of. Thus law aims to exalt its subject, or make him conventionally righteous; while conscience aims to humiliate him

The superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops.

On principle I dislike an oath which requires a man to swear he has not done wrong. It rejects the Christian principle of forgiveness on terms of repentance. I think it is enough if the man does no wrong hereafter.

There will be justice," said Brutha. "If there is no justice, there is nothing.

Justice is the handmaiden of truth, and when truth dies, justice is buried with it.

How near to good is what is fair!

He who makes his law a curse, by his own law shall surely die.