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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"We declare that a great number of those who are condemned to eternal punishment suffer that everlasting calamity because of ignorance of those mysteries of faith which must be known and believed in order to be numbered among the elect."
"No people anywhere in the world would accept being expelled en masse from their own country; how can anyone require the people of Palestine to accept a punishment which nobody else would tolerate?"
"All emphasis in American prisons is on punishment, retribution, and disparagement, and almost none is on rehabilitation."
"Embracing a certain quotient of racial bias and discrimination against the poor is an inexorable aspect of supporting capital punishment. This is an immoral condition that makes rejecting the death penalty on moral grounds not only defensible but necessary for those who refuse to accept unequal or unjust administration of punishment."
"A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight."
"I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment."
"There is no harsher means of punishment, than to answer malice with kindness."
"A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy."
"Will not be punished for your anger, your anger is the punishment."
"we follow One who stood and wept at the grave of Lazarus-not surely, because He was grieved that Mary and Martha wept, and sorrowed for their lack of faith (though some thus interpret) but because death, the punishment of sin, is even more horrible in his eyes than in ours."
"The reality is that capital punishment in America is a lottery. It is a punishment that is shaped by the constraints of poverty, race, geography and local politics."
"Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible."
"Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent."
"Even if a civil society were to be dissolved by the consent of all its members (e.g., if a people inhabiting an island decided to separate and disperse throughout the world), the last murderer remaining in prison would first have to be executed, so that each has done to him what his deeds deserve and blood guilt does not cling to the people for not having insisted upon this punishment; for otherwise the people can be regarded as collaborators in his public violation of justice."
"People with new ideas, people with the faintest capacity for saying something new, are extremely few in number, extraordinarily so, in fact."
"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."
"Let us understand that God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation."
"Goodness is to do good to the deserving and love the good and hate the wicked, and not to be eager to inflict punishment or take vengeance, but to be gracious and kindly and forgiving."
"If you ever meet someone who cannot understand why solitary confinement is considered punishment, you have met a misanthrope."
"When you grow suspicious of a person and begin a system of espionage upon him, your punishment will be that you will find your suspicions true."
