Societies have debated the severity of punishment for vile acts over millennia, with complex moral arguments on both sides of the question. But citizens and society should pay more attention to the trend of over-criminalisation of common human failings and frailties.

Rohini Nilekani

The science linking the increased frequency and severity of extreme weather to the climate crisis has matured tremendously in the last couple of years.

Al Gore

Many people think that virtue consists of severity towards others.

Alphonse Karr

The causes and severity of NSA infractions vary widely. One in 10 incidents is attributed to a typographical error in which an analyst enters an incorrect query and retrieves data about U.S phone calls or emails.

Barton Gellman

I forget a lot of things sometimes. I'm not one to sit here and complain. While I did not know the severity of what continuous head traumas could do to an individual and the mind and so forth, I'm not going to sit here and complain.

Bruce Smith

I wanted to do a lot of things in wine, but I didn't know how to do it. So before I invested in anything, before I really put my dollars into it, I put my whole heart, soul, mind into it so that I really understand the severity of each outcome, the severity of success and the severity of failure.

C. J. McCollum

To the extent that human spirits are made gentle by the social state, sensibility increases; as it increases, the severity of punishment must diminish if one wishes to maintain a constant relation between object and feeling.

Cesare Beccaria

The severity of punishments ought to be relative to the state of the nation itself. Stronger and more easily felt impressions have to be made on a people only just out of the savage state. A lightning strike is needed to stop a fierce lion who is provoked by a gunshot.

Cesare Beccaria

Scientists have been warning about global warming for decades. It's too late to stop it now, but we can lessen its severity and impacts.

David Suzuki

If you take every challenge everyone has in their life and multiply it in severity you get what it's like in the life of an actor.

Dee Wallace

An overview of all wars since the establishment of the Bank of England in 1694 suggests that most of them would have been greatly reduced in severity, or perhaps not even fought at all, without fiat money.

G. Edward Griffin

An Indian's dress of deer skins, which is wet a hundred times upon his back, dries soft; and his lodge also, which stands in the rains, and even through the severity of winter, is taken down as soft and as clean as when it was first put up.

George Catlin

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

George Eliot

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

George Eliot

I don't know why they're doing it. I have to assume that their motives are positive, not negative. But they don't understand the severity of the problem in this state.

Gray Davis

As the winter set in with its customary Canadian severity the real trouble of the French began. They did not suffer from the cold, but they were dying of scurvy.

Harry Johnston

In No. 1 of this street the cholera first appeared seventeen years ago, and spread up it with fearful virulence; but this year it appeared at the opposite end, and ran down it with like severity.

Henry Mayhew

This Department of Treasury, run by this administration, using the same tried and true accounting methods that every business in America uses, cast new light on the fiscal severity that our Nation is facing, what some would call a mess.

Jim Costa

The judgements about the severity of the threat posed by Iraq's weapons of a mass destruction - WMD - were presented with a certainty that was not justified.

John Chilcot

The unjustifiable severity of a parent is loaded with this aggravation, that those whom he injures are always in his sight.

Joseph Addison

Forgiveness is not a feeling - it's a decision we make because we want to do what's right before God. It's a quality decision that won't be easy and it may take time to get through the process, depending on the severity of the offense.

Joyce Meyer