On Crimes and Punishments

the strength to endure evils when they have reached their extreme, they are not moved to remedy the disorders that oppress them, nor to recognize the most palpable truths. These truths, precisely because of their simplicity, escape vulgar minds that are not accustomed to analyzing objects, but rather to receiving them as a whole, more through tradition than through examination.

Let us open the histories, and we will see that the laws, which are—or should be—the covenants of free men, have for the most part been nothing but the instrument of the passions of a few, or have been born from a fortuitous and passing necessity. They have not been dictated by a cold examiner of human nature who might concentrate in a single point the actions of a multitude of men, and consider them from this point of view: the greatest happiness shared by the greatest number. Happy are those very few nations that did not wait for the slow motion of human combinations and vicissitudes to make an improvement toward the good follow the extremity of evils, but instead