The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes..was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence.. Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man. Thomas Jefferson
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  2. There is but one supremacy... and it remains known and unknown to it's human creation... of many hues, shapes and sizes. - T.F. Hodge
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  5. Embrace all. - Lailah Gifty Akita
More Quotes By Thomas Jefferson
  1. When a language dies, a way of understanding the world dies with it, a way of looking at the world.
  2. We speak in (rich) monotones. Our poetry is haunted by the music it has left behind. Orpheus shrinks to a poet when he looks back, with the impatience of reason, on a music stronger than death.
  3. Books - the best antidote against the marsh-gas of boredom and vacuity
  4. What you don't know by heart you haven't really loved deeply enough
  5. The inception of human consciousness, the genesis of awareness, must have entailed prolonged 'condensations' around intractable nodes of wonder and terror, at the discriminations to be made between the self and the other, between being and non-being (the discovery of the scandal of death).
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