Punishment Quotes

The child is brought up to know its social duties by means of a system of love-rewards and punishments, and in this way it is taught that its security in life depends on its parents (and, subsequently, other people) loving it and being able to believe in its love for them.

~ Sigmund Freud

The wrath of God is never an evil wrath. God gets angry because he loves people like a mother would love her child if someone were to harm it. There is something wrong if the mother never gets angry, it is safe to say that that is the unloving mother.

~ Criss Jami

To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency, to forgive them is cruelty.

~ Maximilien De Robespierre

It became clear to him that all the dreadful evil he had been witnessing in prisons and jails and the quiet self-satisfaction of the perpetrators of this evil were the consequences of men trying to do what was impossible; trying to correct evil while being evil themselves...Now he saw clearly what all the terrors he had seen came from, and what ought to be done to put a stop to them. The answer he could not find was the same that Christ gave to Peter. It was that we should forgive always an infinite number of times because there are no men who have not sinned themselves, and therefore none can punish or correct others.

~ Leo Tolstoy

It is better for a leader to make a mistake in forgiving than to make a mistake in punishing.

~ Anonymous

Maybe this was my punishment, and perhaps justly so. 'It wasn't meant to be', Khala Jamila had said. Or, maybe, it was meant not to be.

~ Khaled Hosseini

I imagine the whole universe moving into hell because of licking God's candy.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

One of the parrots was very friendly with...Master of the Robes. He used to feed it nuts. As it nibbled from his fingers, he used to stroke its head, at which the bird appeared to enter a state of ecstasy. I very much wanted this kind of friendliness and several times tried to get a similar response, but to no avail. So I took a stick to punish it. Of course, thereafter it fled at the sight of me. This was a very good lesson in how to make friends: not by force but by compassion.

~ Dalai Lama Xiv

To me, many of what seemed to be Bible contradictions only pointed to the grace of Christ. It is not so much a rule book on how to be holy as it is a prophecy of the One who can make you holy. In this, I see God as the least bigoted of all in existence: While men always, in their hearts, delight in vengeance for being wronged, God is the only Being who wants to free you from the penalty of His own laws.

~ Criss Jami

Feelings of guilt are the worst punishment. You are being punished by yourself.

~ Debasish Mridha

You can't teach kindness with a whip, Janus.

~ Chris Lester

Sometimes people with low self-esteem will try to punish you for caring about them.

~ Wayne Gerard Trotman

Mankind, in all his lusts, punishes himself. The gods have to do very little.

~ Criss Jami

today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it isalmost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensibleto the author and his contemporaries, – they read it with a clearconscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselvesto death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still – thatOn the Genealogy of Morality4248 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153–4.49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137–9, pp. 140–1, pp. 143–4.50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31–7.is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-humanproposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as peoplesay, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act outa ‘demonstration’ of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is whatthe oldest and longest period in human history teaches us – and punishment,too, has such very strong festive aspects! –

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Everything burned, everyone lied, and no one paid for it but the ones in the muck.

~ Chris Galford

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

Isn't watching sacred potential kill itself as good a punishment as eternal fire?

~ Thomm Quackenbush

To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.

~ Federico García Lorca

The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish day-dream. Properly speaking, there is no such thing as revenge. Revenge is an act which you want to commit when you are powerless and because you are powerless: as soon as the sense of impotence is removed, the desire evaporates also.

~ George Orwell

The idea of death has been associated with the fear of the unknown, and the punishment or reward for our life choices. There is no punishment, and there is no reward. We punish ourselves instantly, when we choose to be destructive. We reward ourselves, when we choose being our loving selves.

~ Raphael Zernoff

I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

~ Howard Zinn

If you refuse to deal with time today, time will deal with you tomorrow.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

Evil gains work their punishment.

~ Sophocles

Is it justice to make evil, and then punish for it?

~ James Fenimore Cooper

My Dear Friend,You do not know me, but I know you. Since you first breathed in this world, I have watched you. The hopes you have wished, the worries you have feared, the sins you have committed–I know them all. I am The Observer, The Recorder. I am also The Punisher. The time has come for your punishment. Listen closely, the hourglass runs low.

~ Christopher Pike

What?' He cried, darting at him a look of fury: 'Dare you still implore the Eternal's mercy? Would you feign penitence, and again act an Hypocrite's part? Villain, resign your hopes of pardon. Thus I secure my prey!'As He said this, darting his talons into the Monk's shaven crown, He sprang with him from the rock. The Caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio's shrieks. The Daemon continued to soar aloft, till reaching a dreadful height, He released the sufferer. Headlong fell the Monk through the airy waste; The sharp point of a rock received him; and He rolled from precipice to precipice, till bruised and mangled He rested on the river's banks. Life still existed in his miserable frame: He attempted in vain to raise himself; His broken and dislocated limbs refused to perform their office, nor was He able to quit the spot where He had first fallen. The Sun now rose above the horizon; Its scorching beams darted full upon the head of the expiring Sinner. Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio's wounds; He had no power to drive them from him, and they fastened upon his sores, darted their stings into his body, covered him with their multitudes, and inflicted on him tortures the most exquisite and insupportable. The Eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks. A burning thirst tormented him; He heard the river's murmur as it rolled beside him, but strove in vain to drag himself towards the sound. Blind, maimed, helpless, and despairing, venting his rage in blasphemy and curses, execrating his existence, yet dreading the arrival of death destined to yield him up to greater torments, six miserable days did the Villain languish. On the Seventh a violent storm arose: The winds in fury rent up rocks and forests: The sky was now black with clouds, now sheeted with fire: The rain fell in torrents; It swelled the stream; The waves overflowed their banks; They reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and when they abated carried with them into the river the Corse of the despairing Monk.

~ Matthew Lewis

The word grows mad on the fermentOf angry actions, the authorities can only inflictVisible punishments. Now regard with the unpracticedInner eye the unseen presence of Judgement thenYou will understand the nature of your soul's torment

~ Jalaluddin Rumi

Steal not this book for fear of shameFor on it is the owners nameAnd when you die the Lord will sayWhere is the book you stole awayAnd when you say you do not knowThe Lord will say go down below.

~ L.m. Montgomery

The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.

~ George Bernard Shaw

Sure, some of us humans might be angry at a sovereign God about Hell, but know that that is about as meaningful as a few germs being angry at humans about bleach.

~ Criss Jami

The criminal who revolted against society hates it, and considers himself in the right; society was wrong, not he. Has he not, moreover, undergone his punishment? Accordingly he is absolved, acquitted in his own eyes. In spite of different opinions, everyone will acknowledge that there are acts which everywhere and always, under no matter what legal system, are beyond doubt criminal, and should be regarded as long as man is man.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

You cannot change someone using fear, degradation, humiliation, or by comparing them to others. It can only be done through love, with love, for love.

~ Suzy Kassem

I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .

~ John Stuart Mill

Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.

~ Thomas Szasz

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished, the others can only be hurt.

~ William Ernest Hocking

[I]t is a mistake to rush to impose the individual ethical responsibility that the corporate structure deflects. This is the temptation of the ethical which, as Zizek has argued, the capitalist system is using in order to protect itself in the wake of the credit crisis - the blame will be put on supposedly pathological individuals, those’ abusing the system’, rather than on the system itself. But the evasion is actually a two step procedure - since structure will often be invoked (either implicitly or openly) precisely at the point when there is the possibility of individuals who belong to the corporate structure being punished. At this point, suddenly, the causes of abuse or atrocity are so systemic, so diffuse, that no individual can be held responsible… But this impasse - it is only individuals that can be held ethically responsible for actions, and yet the cause of these abuses and errors is corporate, systemic - is not only a dissimulation: it precisely indicates what is lacking in capitalism. What agencies are capable of regulating and controlling impersonal structures? How is it possible to chastise a corporate structure? Yes, corporations can legally be treated as individuals - but the problem is that corporations, whilst certainly entities, are not like individual humans, and any analogy between punishing corporations and punishing individuals will therefore necessarily be poor. And it is not as if corporations are the deep-level agents behind everything; they are themselves constrained by/expressions of the ultimate cause-that-is-not-asubject: Capital.

~ Mark Fisher

As for logical consequences, the logic is highly debatable. If you continually arrive late for my workshop, despite my warning that lateness is unacceptable, I may find it logical to lock you out of my classroom. Or perhaps it would be more logical to keep you locked in after class for the same number of minutes you were late. Or maybe my logic demands that you miss out on the snacks. As you may be starting to suspect, these are not true exercises in logic. They're really more of a free association, where we try to think of a way to make the wrongdoer suffer. We hope that the suffering will motivate the offender to do better in the future.

~ Joanna Faber

Instead of feeling an urge to fix the problem or make amends, punishment prompts a child to think selfishly. What television shows will she be forced to miss? What dessert will she have to give up? She’s likely to be filled with resentment instead of remorse.

~ Joanna Faber

The beauty of problem-solving is that, unlike punishment, it offers endless possibilities. If you're committed to punishment and your child continues to misbehave, all you can do is punish more severely. You might hit him harder or take away more privileges, but chances are you won't get any closer to your goal of having a cooperative child. And you'll create a lot of ill will in the process. With problem-solving, you can always go back and brainstorm some more. When you put your heads together, you're bound to come up with something that will work for both of you.

~ Joanna Faber

Readers who have owned animals will appreciate how difficult it would be to train a dog to play exclusively in his own yard, to fetch his sweater whenever he sees it is raining outside, or to be generous in sharing his dog biscuits with other dogs. Yet these same people would not even question the feasibility of trying to use reward and punishment to teach their children the same behaviors.

~ Thomas Gordon