Punishment Quotes

When God punishes a land, he deprives it leaders of wisdom.

Italian Proverb

Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.

George Bernard Shaw

Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate. In this respect there was in the past a change of mentality, in which the law and the need for punishment were obscured. Ultimately this also narrowed the concept of law, which in fact is not only just being nice or courteous, but is found in the truth. And another component of the truth is that I must punish the one who has sinned against real love

Pope Benedict XVI

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

Anthony Liccione

Hold you there, neither a strange hand nor my own, neither heavy nor light shall touch my bum.

Miguel de Cervantes

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Marquis de Sade

Well, there's no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth.

Lady Gregory

If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.

Thomas Szasz

But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.

Victor Hugo

I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.

Lord (George Gordon) Byron

AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.

Ambrose Bierce

The punishment of criminals should serve a purpose. When a man is hanged he is useless.

Voltaire (FrançoisMarie Arouet)

Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation.

Claude LeviStrauss

Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.

William Blake

Punishment is justice for the unjust.

Saint Augustine of Hippo

I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.

Gore Vidal

Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

Friedrich Nietzsche

All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.

Friedrich Nietzsche

We have found that morals are not, like bacon, to be cured by hanging; nor, like wine, to be improved by sea voyages; nor, like honey, to be preserved in cells.

William Cooke Taylor

Woe to the hand that shed this costly blood

William Shakespeare