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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"In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity."
"Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature."
"There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse."
"Perhaps this is just punishment for those who have been heartless, to understand only when nothing can be undone."
"Spare the rod and spoil the child."
"Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty."
"Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be!"
"To take a life when a life has been lost is revenge, not justice."
"If the people are governed by laws and punishment is used to maintain order, they will try to avoid the punishment but have no sense of shame. If they are governed by virtue and rules of propriety are used to maintain order, they will have a sense of shame and will become good as well."
"There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. What the individual can do is to give a fine example, and to have the courage to uphold ethical values .. in a society of cynics."
"As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
"Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders, to which no criminal's deed, however calculated can be compared. For there to be an equivalency, the death penalty would have to punish a criminal who had warned his victim of the date at which he would inflict a horrible death on him and who, from that moment onward, had confined him at his mercy for months. Such a monster is not encountered in private life."
"Vices are their own punishment"
"Even the wicked get worse than they deserve."
"It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it."
"Punishment is justice for the unjust."
"The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other. They are worse than ever when, at the termination of their punishment, they return to society."
"Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward."
"Society, and the family as its psycho social agent, has to solve a difficult problem: How to break a person's will without his being aware of it? Yet by a complicated process of indoctrination, rewards, punishments, and fitting ideology, it solves this task by and large so well that most people believe they are following their own will and are unaware that their will itself is conditioned and manipulated."
"Love is the source of every virtue in you and of every deed which deserves punishment."
