"It is the writer's business not to accuse and not to prosecute, but to champion the guilty, once they are condemned and suffer punishment."
Punishment quotes
Punishment
981 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Punishment quotes (page 6 of 50)
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"The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder."
"How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon?"
"The blessed in the kingdom of heaven will see the punishments of the damned, in order that their bliss be more delightful for them."
"Every guilty person is his own hangman."
"The prize and punishments are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them."
"In the end I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and that people can be trusted to behave decently if only you will let them alone."
"What [Franz] Kafka says about the Tower of Babel: In the beginning there were actually many languages, and then as a punishment God gave the world a single language. And then they stopped understanding each other."
"Old age, after all, is merely the punishment for having lived."
"My position concerning God is that of an agnostic. I am convinced that a vivid consciousness of the primary importance of moral principles for the betterment and ennoblement of life does not need the idea of a law-giver, especially a law-giver who works on the basis of reward and punishment."
"In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime."
"I think capital punishment's day is done in this country. I don't think it's fairly applied."
"We need to understand the difference between discipline and punishment. Punishment is what you do to someone; discipline is what you do for someone."
"No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been."
"I personally have always voted for the death penalty because I believe that people who go out prepared to take the lives of other people forfeit their own right to live. I believe that that death penalty should be used only very rarely, but I believe that no-one should go out certain that no matter how cruel, how vicious, how hideous their murder, they themselves will not suffer the death penalty."
"We give it up and just look directly with compassion and humor at who we are. Then loneliness is no threat and heartache, no punishment."
"One of the principal functions of a friend is to suffer (in a milder and symbolic form) the punishments that we should like, but are unable, to inflict upon our enemies."
"You take my house when you do take the prop That doth sustain my house; you take my life When you do take the means whereby I live."
"It is not only highly desirable but necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment."
"Admitting weakness seems to be such a severe psychic threat for Bush that when he makes a mistake it's safer just to reinforce it. The strategy creates a perverse system of rewards and punishments"