24 quotes about punishment

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

Punishment

Friedrich Nietzsche

WriterGerman1844 · 19th century

4.5 · 53 votes · 190 reads

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

William Shakespeare

WriterBritish1564 · 16th century

150 reads

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

Punishment

Woodrow T. Wilson

PoliticianAmerican1856 · 19th century

4.2 · 49 votes · 175 reads

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Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!

Punishment

Friedrich Nietzsche

WriterGerman1844 · 19th century

3.9 · 56 votes

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Every guilty person is his own hangman.

Punishment

PhilosopherRoman-4 · 1st century BC

3.5 · 45 votes · 102 reads

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

Punishment

Miguel de Cervantes

PoetSpanish1547 · 16th century

3.9 · 57 votes · 198 reads

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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.

Punishment

PoetBritish1788 · 18th century

4.0 · 31 votes

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Let the punishment be proportionate to the offense.

Punishment

Marcus Tulius Cicero

PoliticianRoman-106 · 2nd century BC

5.0 · 51 votes · 185 reads

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

Punishment

4.6 · 53 votes

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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 occurren

Punishment

PoetIrish1854 · 19th century

3.1 · 45 votes

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Prisons are built with stones of Law. Brothels with the bricks of religion.
Will Rogers
ComedianAmerican1879 · 19th century
3.2 · 18 votes · 174 reads
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Punishment is justice for the unjust.
Rudyard Kipling
WriterBritish1865 · 19th century
4.5 · 38 votes · 33 reads
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Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime.
John Ruskin
WriterEnglish1819 · 19th century
3.1 · 36 votes · 147 reads
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Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
Albert Camus
NovelistFrench1913 · 20th century
4.6 · 5 votes · 87 reads
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Take away the danger and remove the restraint, and wayward nature runs free.
Horace
PoetRoman-65 · 1st century BC
3.1 · 22 votes · 142 reads
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The first and greatest punishment of the sinner is the conscience of sin.
Seneca
PhilosopherRoman-4 · 1st century BC
5.0 · 23 votes · 162 reads
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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
PhilosopherGreek-384 · 4th century BC
3.7 · 58 votes · 29 reads
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The punishment of criminals should serve a purpose. When a man is hanged he is useless.
Virginia Woolf
WriterBritish1882 · 19th century
4.4 · 12 votes · 50 reads
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Then spare the rod and spoil the child.
Samuel Beckett
WriterIrish1906 · 20th century
3.1 · 18 votes · 28 reads
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There is no person so severely punished, as those who subject themselves to the whip of their own remorse.
Seneca
PhilosopherRoman-4 · 1st century BC
4.9 · 25 votes · 133 reads
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Thwackum was for doing justice, and leaving mercy to Heaven.
Henry Fielding
NovelistEnglish1707 · 18th century
3.1 · 60 votes · 193 reads
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When God punishes a land, he deprives it leaders of wisdom.
Italian proverb
Italian
3.3 · 60 votes · 35 reads
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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 inflic
Simone de Beauvoir
NovelistFrench1908 · 20th century
4.8 · 48 votes · 140 reads
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Whipping and abuse are like laudanum: you have to double the dose as the sensibilities decline.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
WriterAmerican1811 · 19th century
3.4 · 62 votes · 133 reads
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