Punishment quotes
981 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside punishment — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"The great danger of humane punishment is that people will come to accept state murder as something sanitary. I don't think bureaucracy should ever be entrusted with that kind of power."
"Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness."
"Writing is so difficult that I feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter."
"Three things are required of you: the wishes you made when you first knew the breadth of this life; the contract you signed when you decided your wishes were not true or possible; and the exacting of the punishment you agreed to when you knew you would break the contract of your life."
"Stay positive, all other choices are pointless punishments to your psyche."
"Our faults are not seen, But past us; neither felt, but only in The punishment."
"If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender."
"Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exorbitant desires, which they cannot be but by rewards and punishments, that will over-balance the satisfaction any one shall propose to himself in the breach of the law."
"I've always taken my hangovers as consequence, not as a punishment."
"Islam asserts that on the unappealable Day of Judgment every perpetrator of the image of a living creature will be raised from the dead with his works, and he will be commanded to bring them to life, and he will fail, and be cast out with them into the fires of punishment."
"The punishment of those who have loved women too much is to love them always."
"The fear of hell, the punishment of sin, how the modern parent revolts from such teaching. Yet I will assert that far from doing us children harm, it was a sure foundation to the world of our confidence, a master girder in our palace of delight."
"The good of the governed is the end, and rewards and punishments are the means, of all government. The government of the supreme and all-perfect Mind, over all his intellectual creation, is by proportioning rewards to piety and virtue, and punishments to disobedience and vice. ... The joys of heaven are prepared, and the horrors of hell in a future state, to render the moral government of the universe perfect and complete. Human government is more or less perfect, as it approaches nearer or diverges further from an imitation of this perfect plan of divine and moral government."
"Make your way to death row and speak with the tragic victims of criminality. As they prepare to make their pathetic walk to the electric chair, their hopeless cry is that society will not forgive. Capital punishment is society's final assertion that it will not forgive."
"I do what I do without hope of reward or fear of punishment. I do not require Heaven or Hell to bribe or scare me into acting decently."
"We do not correct the man we hang; we correct others by him."
"We had a rule in the school that when you're punished, you carry out the punishment and then complain, which I felt was absolutely unfair: if I'd done it, what was the point of complaining?"
"As governor, I came to believe that the death penalty would be a just punishment for certain, especially heinous crimes, such as the murder of a child or the murder of a police officer. The events of September 11 convinced me that terrorists also deserve the ultimate punishment."
"A material resurrection seems strange and even absurd except for purposes of punishment, and all punishment which is to revenge rather than correct must be morally wrong, and when the World is at an end, what moral or warning purpose can eternal tortures answer?"
"I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair."
