Punishment Quotes

Hmmm,” you muse out loud. Your voice is deep and carnal, a sound which sends new surges of desire rushing to my sex. “These balls are awfully dusty - if only I knew a little slut who was good at polishing balls…

~ Felicity Brandon

[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?

~ Iain Pears

There's always enough retribution to be dealt.

~ Amber Silvia

Yeah, reflections! The same, but different. Like twins - like blood brothers! And when you need something bad done, like punishment or revenge, you'll just ask me, and I will do it -

~ Sonya Hartnett

Is it not true that in ancient times the worst punishment of all was not death, but banishment?

~ Jean Said Makdisi

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

~ Ernst Jünger

We have no need of God to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men are enough, with our help.

~ Albert Camus

It is the absence of hope, which equals the despair that is the punishment.

~ James Fox

Now you fear punishment and beg for your lives, so I will let you free, if not for any other reason so that you can see the difference between a Greek king and a barbarian tyrant, so do not expect to suffer any harm from me. A king does not kill messengers.

~ Alexander The Great

Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.

~ Laura Esquivel

Blade, she thought. I swallowed it; now cuts my loins forever. Punishment. Married to a Jew and shacking up with a German assassin. She felt tears again in her eyes, boiling. For all I have committed. Wrecked. 'Let's go,' she said, rising to her feet. 'The hairdresser.

~ Philip K. Dick

One is punished most for one’s virtues.

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

All that evening Nell sat alone in her bedroom trembling with curious satisfaction. For punishment Eva had been sent to her room without supper and Nell sat listening now to the even, steady sobs far off down the hall. It was dark and on the river shore a night bird tried its note cautiously against the silence. Down in the pantry, the dishes done, Suse and Jessie, dark as night itself, drank coffee by the great stove and mumbled over stories of the old times before the War. Nell fetched her smelling salts and sniffed the frosted stopper of the flowered bottle till the trembling stopped. (Where The Woodbine Twineth)

~ Davis Grubb

There is not eternal damnation, the only rewards and punishments are right here in this world.

~ Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

Judgment, then, is not an impersonal, legalistic process. It is a matter of love, and it is something we choose for ourselves. Nor is punishment a vindictive act. God's curses are not expressions of hatred, but of fatherly love and discipline. Like medicinal ointment, they hurt in order to heal. They impose suffering that is remedial, restorative, and redemptive. God's wrath is an expression of His love for His wayward children.

~ Scott Hahn

It is better to tell the truth and face the punishment, than to lie and face the consequences.

~ Anthony Liccione

There are people who thirst for blood like tigers. Any man who has once tasted this unlimited power over the blood, over the body and spirit of a human creature like himself, a creature created in the same image and subject to the same law of Christ; any man who has tasted this power, this boundless opportunity to humiliate most bitterly another being made in the image of God — becomes the servant instead of the master of his own emotions. Tyranny is a habit. It can and does eventually develop into a disease. I believe that the best of men may grow coarse, degrade to the level of a beast by sheer force of habit. Blood and power intoxicate one, they develop callousness and lust. The greatest perversions grow finally acceptable and even delicious to mind and heart. The man and the citizen perish in the tyrant for ever and the return to human dignity, remorse and spiritual rebirth becomes scarcely possible to him. Besides, the example and mere possibility of arbitrary power are contagious; they are indeed a great temptation. A society which regards such things calmly is already corrupt at the roots.

~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain?

~ Frank Harris

Studies find that kids who are punished are more likely to misbehave in the future. Punishment actually increases the undesired behavior.

~ Joanna Faber

A slow but steady transformation of deviance has taken place in American society. It has not been a change in behavior as such, but in how behavior is defined. Deviant behaviors that were once defined as immoral, sinful, or criminal have been given medical meanings. Some say that rehabilitation has replaced punishment, but in many cases medical treatments have become a new form of punishment and social control.

~ Peter Conrad

You must suffer me to go my own dark way.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Well some are born to be hanged, and some are not; and many of those who are not hanged are much worse than those who are.

~ Judith Flanders

Discipline at the office had long been enforced by use of three methods: the meeting of the first kind, the meeting of the second kind, and the meeting of the third kind.

~ Pawan Mishra

I no longer fear the pain...I fear no release from this torture...knowing that I've hurt him and he can't forgive me...that he won't be able to make me his good girl again.

~ Willow Madison

There was a feeling in him like waiting for a punishment.

~ Richard Wagamese

Society's revenge matched its fright.

~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The punishment for rape should be castration.

~ Amit Abraham

Those who recognize their innocence do not expect, receive, or accept punishment from any outside source.

~ Alan Cohen

The threat of punishment at home or school only served as a challenge to figure out how to circumvent the consequences when I did what I wanted to do anyway. I didn't fear the punishment, I just saw it as an inconvenience to work around.

~ M.e. Thomas

I concentrate intently on counting: hearing my voice break as the torment and torture builds; fingering myself intensely at his instruction. As we get past ten I slip up; overwhelmed by the sensations wracking my body, I realise in horror that I don’t know which number is next.

~ Felicity Brandon

Severe punishment unquestionably has an immediate effect in reducing a tendency to act in a given way. This result is no doubt responsible for its widespread use. We 'instinctively' attack anyone whose behavior displeases us - perhaps not in physical assault, but with criticism, disapproval, blame, or ridicule. Whether or not there is an inherited tendency to do this, the immediate effect of the practice is reinforcing enough to explain its currency. In the long run, however, punishment does not actually eliminate behavior from a repertoire, and its temporary achievement is obtained at tremendous cost in reducing the over-all efficiency and happiness of the group. (p. 190)

~ B.f. Skinner

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

Generally speaking, punishment makes men hard and cold; it concentrates; it sharpens the feeling of alienation; it strengthens the power of resistance

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.

~ Robert Walser

A small demerit extinguishes a long service.

~ Thomas Fuller

And the thing has been said and said well have no scruple. Take it and copy it.

~ Anatole France

Jupiter is slow looking into his notebook but he always looks.

~ Zenobius

The number of malefactors authorizes not the crime.

~ Thomas Fuller

No one is entirely useless. Even the worst of us can serve as horrible examples.

~ Anonymous Prisoner

The faults of the burglar are the qualities of the financier.

~ George Bernard Shaw