Quotes About Punishment

“Goodness than depends on fear of hell or fear of the policeman or fear of punishment is not goodness at all - it is simply cowardice. Goodness than depends on hope of reward or hope of praise or hope of heaven depends on bribery.”

— A.S. Neill

“She said, "What do you think the punishment is for what we are doing?"
"Death, maybe life in prison." He replied.
"Awesome!" She laughs.
RED-Bruce Willis”

— Clarrissa Lee Moon

“Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Here, new information, new empirical data, led to a direct challenge to the way in which the gods were envisioned. This new doubt encouraged a new kind of punishment for doubt. Set up about 438 BCE, the law against Anaxagoras's atheism held that society must denounce those who do not believe in the divine beings or who teach doctrines about things in the sky.”

— Jennifer Michael Hecht

“I pulled my chair up to the table and Alex sat down, following suit, unable to guard a smile from breaking onto his lips. He was handsome; I had to give him that. His hair was perfectly gelled and his face was smooth and free of stubble. I could even detect the scent of cologne, something I knew him to rarely wear.
"I didn't expect you to show up," he admitted.
"Then why'd you invite me?" I hoped that I hadn't sounded rude.
He chuckled and tucked his napkin into his lap. I did the same. "I guess I'm just a glutton for punishment.”

— Shawn Kirsten Maravel

“The true understanding of our own depravity isn't a punishment-it's an opportunity to understand the value of the gift.”

— Angie Smith

“The views of the Courts in regard to imprisonment have however undergone modification in the last ten years. Imprisonment is seen more and more as a harsh and drastic punishment to be reserved for callous and impenitent characters. We wish to adopt a more enlightened approach in which the probable effect of incarceration upon the life of the accused person and those near to her is carefully weighed.”

— V.G. Hiemstra

“Punishment-shaming a person, caging them, making them unemployable-traps them in addiction. Taking that money and spending it instead on helping them to get jobs and homes and decent lives makes it possible for many of them to stop.”

— Johann Hari

“I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.”

— StanisÅ‚aw Jerzy Lec

“Wishing she could scratch, Morgase also wished that the other woman had not taken her so to heart about the dress not fitting very well. Stuffing the low-necked gown away under the bed, her old nurse had muttered some saying about displaying wares you did not mean to sell, and when Morgase claimed she had just made it up, her reply was At my age, if I make it up, it's still an old saying.Morgase more than half-suspected that her itchy, ill-draped dress was punishment for that gown.”

— Robert Jordan

“In the political jargon of those days, the word "intellectual" was an insult. It indicated someone who did not understand life and was cut off from the people. All the Communists who were hanged at the time by other Communists were awarded such abuse. Unlike those who had their feet solidly on the ground, they were said to float in the air. So it was fair, in a way, that as punishment the ground was permanently pulled out from under their feet, that they remained suspended a little above the floor.”

— Milan Kundera

“If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends.”

— Miguel Ruiz

“A more cynical formulation by the Roman historian Polybius: Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.”

— Carl Sagan

“She replied that it was precisely men well versed in religion who beat their wives. The precepts of religion permitted such punishment. A virtuous woman was not supposed to complain about her husband. Her duty was perfect obedience.”

— Nawal El-Saadawi

“Over time, the persona I assumed in her presence came to supplant my true self. It must have been then I first came to realize that for most people life was not a joy to be embraced with a full heart but a miserable charade to be endured with a false smile, a narrow path of lies, punishment, and repression.”

— Orhan Pamuk

“I read 'Crime and Punishment' years ago and don't recall the details of it, but I do retain a strong sense of the creeping paranoia and panic.”

— Arthur Smith

“But the church, like a tender, loving mother holds aloof from active punishment herself, as the sinner is too severely punished already by the civil law, and there must be at least someone to have pity on him. The church holds aloof, above all, because its judgment alone contains the truth ...”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

“It is from the traditional family that we absorb those universal ideals and principles which are the teaching of Jesus, the bedrock of our religious faith. We are taught the difference between right and wrong, and about the law, just punishment and discipline.”

— Kamisese Mara

“All medical men who have studied the matter know that punishment only aggravates the trouble. Sometimes the cause is physical, but usually it is psychological, and only curable by removing some deepseated and probably unconscious grievance. But most people enjoy punishing anyone who irritates them, and so the medical view is rejected as fancy nonsense. The”

— Bertrand Russell

“The most effective alternative process [to punishment] is probably extinction. This takes time but is much more rapid than allowing the response to be forgotten. The technique seems to be relatively free of objectionable by-products. We recommend it, for example when we suggest that a parent 'pay no attention' to objectionable behavior on the part of his child. If the child's behavior is strong only because it has been reinforced by 'getting a rise out of' the parent, it will disappear when this consequence is no longer forthcoming. (p. 192)”

— B.F. Skinner

“He bent his face into the curve of my neck. "We don't deserve anything Rowen. We don't deserve punishment, we don't deserve happiness, life owes us nothing. Realize that." His voice wasn't gentle anymore; it was as strong as I'd ever heard it. "So we have to take what we want because life sure as shit isn't going to freely hand it over." He kissed the skin just above my collar bone. "And I want you.”

— Nicole Williams

“It takes a major unhappiness, a prolonged and bitter experience, to drive us away from loyalties once formed. And sometimes no amount of punishment can make us repudiate our loyalty.”

— Gordon W. Allport

“Fines are preferable to imprisonment and other types of punishment because they are more efficient. With a fine, the punishment to offenders is also revenue to the State.”

— Gary Becker

“And then ESPN fired me. I did not think that was a fitting punishment.”

— Gregg Easterbrook

“And capital punishment, however ineffective it may be and through whatever ignorance it may be resorted to, is a strictly defensive act, - at least in theory.”

— Benjamin Tucker

“If the executioner goes, my package will never be made public. If he doesn't go, it will be made public exactly fifty years from the day the bill for a moratorium on capital punishment is defeated.”

— Caryl Chessman

“Lying to a committee is a very grave abuse, and there ought to be a clear punishment.”

— John Bercow

“One of the more difficult tasks for me as president was to decide on the issue of confirming capital punishment awarded by courts ... to my surprise ... almost all cases which were pending had a social and economic bias.”

— A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

“Some folk learned the nature of God, that He was merciful, having spared a husband or some cattle, that He was strict, having meted out hard punishment for small sins, that He was attentive, having sent signs of the hunger beforehand, that He was just, having sent the hunger in the first place, or having sent the whales and the teeming reindeer in the end. Some folk learned that He was to be found in the world-in the richness of the grass and the pearly beauty of the Heavens, and others learned that He could not be found in the world, for the world is always wanting, and God is completion.”

— Jane Smiley

“I have lost stories and many starts of novels before. Not always as punishment for 'telling,' but more often as a result of something having gone cold and dead because of a hiatus. Telling, you see, is the same as a hiatus. It means you're not doing it.”

— Cynthia Ozick

“To the extent that human spirits are made gentle by the social state, sensibility increases; as it increases, the severity of punishment must diminish if one wishes to maintain a constant relation between object and feeling.”

— Cesare Beccaria

“I support capital punishment. But let's be clear: It's a decision for each state to make.”

— Ted Cruz

“The most absurd apology for authority and law is that they serve to diminish crime. Aside from the fact that the State is itself the greatest criminal, breaking every written and natural law, stealing in the form of taxes, killing in the form of war and capital punishment, it has come to an absolute standstill in coping with crime. It has failed utterly to destroy or even minimize the horrible scourge of its own creation.”

— Emma Goldman

“The doctrine of eternal punishment is in perfect harmony with the savagery of the men who made the orthodox creeds. It is in harmony with torture, with flaying alive, and with burnings. The men who burned their fellow-men for a moment, believed that God would burn his enemies forever.”

— Robert G. Ingersoll

“Young people don't always do what they're told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment.”

— Rick Riordan

“Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they'll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.”

— Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

“It doesn't make any difference if you are in favor of capital punishment or if you are opposed to capital punishment. The fact of the matter is that as a viable penalty, capital punishment does not work at this time and has not worked in the State of Florida for many, many years.”

— Gerald Kogan

“Those of us who don't want to worship an invisible being or spend our days fretting about punishment in Hades do want to be able to share what we hold dear with our families and the broader world, and we want to be understood and appreciated for who we are.”

— Greg Epstein

“Publication is almost certainly a punishment for having written a book.”

— Joseph O'Neill

“With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.”

— Honore De Balzac

“It's kind of like sentencing. A lot of people say that we have a heavy sentence for this crime and a light sentence for another crime, and what we ought to do is reduce the heavy sentence so it's more in line with the other. Wrong. In most cases we ought to increase the light sentence and make it compatible with the heavy sentence, and be serious about punishment because we are becoming too tolerant as a society, folks, especially of crime, in too many parts of the country.”

— Rush Limbaugh

“It's not just that humiliating people, of any age, is a nasty and disrespectful way of treating them. It's that humiliation, like other forms of punishment, is counterproducti ve. 'Doing to' strategies
as opposed to those that might be described as 'working with'
can never achieve any result beyond temporary compliance, and it does so at a disturbing cost.”

— Alfie Kohn

“He who loveth God with all his heart feareth not death, nor punishment, nor judgment, nor hell, because perfect love giveth sure access to God. But he who still delighteth in sin, no marvel if he is afraid of death and judgment.”

— Thomas A Kempis

“Come, all ye lovers of liberty, break the oppressor's rod, loose the iron grasp of mobocracy, and bring to condign punishment all those who trample under foot the glorious Constitution and the people's rights.”

— Joseph Smith, Jr.

“Prisons where people can't even work is the worst punishment you can think of. And I don't think we should put all convicts in such facilities where people are deprived of their freedom.”

— Vladimir Putin

“How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less.”

— Charles Baudelaire

“There are no evil people; there are perfectly good people who are of the track, but they do not need condemnation or punishment; they only need to get upon the rails again.”

— Wallace D. Wattles

“Experience gained in two schools under my control has taught me that punishment does not purify, if anything, it hardens children.”

— Mahatma Gandhi

“God is a being who gives everything but punishment in over measure.”

— Henry Ward Beecher

“We fight for territory. We see it in our Congress, we see it in our political systems, we see it in our ways of life, how separated we are. When we moved out of the cities and we lost all of the memory that was in cities, and we - one of the highest achievements in our culture is to be able to segregate yourself from everyone else, and the deep thing is the deepest punishment is solitary confinement.”

— Wynton Marsalis