"Legislation may at times be disobeyed, but never law, for the breaking brings swift punishment of its own."
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Punishment quotes
Punishment
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Punishment quotes (page 12 of 50)
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"Sin contains its own judgement and punishment."
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"Death does not trouble me. I have no fear of supernatural punishments, of course, nor could I enjoy an eternal life in which there would be nothing left for me to do, the task of living having been accomplished."
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"How can any Action be meritorious of Praise or Dispraise, Reward or Punishment, when the natural Principle of Self-Love is the only and the irresistible Motive to it?"
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"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."
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"Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?"
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"In Israel, the maximum legal penalty for denying the existence of God is one year in prison, while the punishment for denying the existence of the Holocaust is up to five years' imprisonment."
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"Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust."
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"Pain is not a punishment. And pleasure is not a reward. You could argue that failure is not punishment and Success is not reward. They're just failure and success. You can choose how you respond."
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"But once a culture develops sufficiently to become skeptical, the idea of censorship becomes less attractive. To suppress a book or a picture or a sculpture or a play or a film is a terrible act of aggression against the artist who created it. This is a miming of capital punishment; it destroys the life that has been emanated by a life."
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"Should one be shallow enough to view existence as a system of rewards and punishments, one soon learns that we pay as dearly for our triumphs as we do for our defeats."
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"It is a frightful satire and an epigram on the modern age that the only use it knows for solitude is to make it a punishment, a jail sentence."
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"It is easy enough to say, I do not believe in God. For God permits all things to be said of Him with impunity. he looks at our acts. And any breach of His Law carries with it, not its vindictive, but it purifying, compelling punishment."
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"I don't think I can really believe in doomsday; I could hardly believe in rewards and punishments, in heaven or hell. As I wrote down in one of my sonnets - I seem to be always plagiarizing, imitating myself or somebody else for that matter - I think I am quite unworthy of heaven or of hell, and even of immortality."
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"I believe that any form of art is a species of exploration and transgression. ... Art by its nature is a transgressive act, and artists must accept being punished for it. The more original and unsettling their art, the more devastating the punishment."
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"I have lived to see the greatest plague on earth -- the condemning of God's word, a fearful thing, surpassing all other plagues in the world; for thereupon most surely follow all manner of punishments, eternal and corporal."
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"it is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime"
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"But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty."
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"To punish is the most difficult thing there is. A society such as ours needs to question every aspect of punishment as it is practiced everywhere: in the army, the schools, the factories."
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"Humanists try to behave decently and honorably without any expectation of rewards or punishments in an afterlife. The creator of the universe has been unknown to us so far. We serve as well as we can to the highest abstraction of which we have some understanding, which is our community."
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