Quotes about punishment

Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.

— Woody Allen

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness.

— Aristotle

Punishment is justice for the unjust.

— St. Augustine

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

— William Blake

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

— Jerry Brown

Hanging is too good for him said Mr. Cruelty.

— John Bunyan

Then spare the rod and spoil the child.

— Samuel Butler

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 Byron

Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.

— Albert Camus

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

— Miguel De Cervantes

Let the punishment be proportionate to the offense.

— Marcus T. Cicero

It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.

— Pierre Corneille

Why not whip the teacher when the pupil misbehaves?

— Diogenes of Sinope

Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to Heaven.

— Henry Fielding

In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.

— Michel Foucault

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

Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.

— Edward F. Halifax

One should not lift the rod against our enemies upon the private information of another.

— Hitopadesa

Take away the danger and remove the restraint, and wayward nature runs free.

— Horace

Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.

— Victor Hugo

Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.

— Ellen Key

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 Levi-Strauss

Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.

— Andre Malraux

No one provokes me with impunity.

— Mary Queen Of Scots

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

Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

— Friedrich Nietzsche

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

— Italian Proverb

If your buttocks burn, you know you have done wrong.

— South African Proverb

Many without punishment, none without sin.

— John Ray

Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.

— John Ruskin

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

The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin.

— Seneca

Every guilty person is his own hangman.

— Seneca

There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.

— Seneca

And where the offence is, let the great axe fall.

— William Shakespeare

Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.

— Harriet Beecher Stowe

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

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

He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.

— Anthony Trollope

Next to the prosperity of a good person, I am best pleased with the confusion of a rascal.

— Source Unknown

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

— Gore Vidal

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

— Voltaire

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just.

— Simone Weil

One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

— Oscar Wilde

Penalty is different than punishment, because it offers something with which to regain honor.

— Vanna Bonta