Sunday, April 19, 2015 – Appropriate Punishment
If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed. ~ Albert Einstein
Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent then the one derived from fear of punishment. ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty. ~ Henry Ford
Punishment may make us obey the orders we are given, but at best it will only teach an obedience to authority, not a self-control which enhances our self-respect. ~ Bruno Bettelheim
A person who has been punished is not less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment. ~ B. F. Skinner
I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again. ~ Bill Maher
All punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil. ~ Jeremy Bentham
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
If you’re going to do something wrong, do it big, because the punishment is the same either way. ~ Jayne Mansfield
In hell there is no other punishment than to begin over and over again the tasks left unfinished in your lifetime. ~ Andre Gide
In my childhood I always felt that I was treated unjustly, without a mother, sick, and with the threat of punishment in Hell hanging over my head. ~ Edvard Munch
That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the head of mortal man. ~ George Berkeley
Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality. Morality is not bribery or threats. Religion is bribery and threats. Humans have morality. We don’t need religion. ~ Penn Jillette
God preordained, for his own glory and the display of His attributes of mercy and justice, a part of the human race, without any merit of their own, to eternal salvation, and another part, in just punishment of their sin, to eternal damnation. ~ John Calvin
That the saints may enjoy their beatitude and the grace of God more abundantly they are permitted to see the punishment of the damned in hell. ~ Thomas Aquinas
I should not regret a fair and full trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment. ~ James Madison
The modern view of criminal justice, broadly, is that public concern with morality or expediency decrees expiation for the violation of a norm; this concern finds expression in the infliction of punishment on the evil doer by agents of the state, the evil doer, however, enjoying the protection of a regular procedure. ~ Max Weber
I shall ask for the abolition for the punishment of death until I have the infallibility of human judgment demonstrated to me. ~ Marquis de Lafayette
It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly. ~ Margaret Mead
Punishment is the last and the least effective instrument in the hands of the legislator for the prevention of crime. ~ John Ruskin
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. ~ Hannah Arendt
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves. ~ Percy Bysshe Shelley
Just vengeance does not call for punishment. ~ Pierre Corneille
To sin offers repentance and forgiveness; not to sin offers only punishment. ~ Jose Bergamin
Punishment cannot heal spirits, can only break them. ~ Barbara Deming
The long and distressing controversy over capital punishment is very unfair to anyone meditating murder. ~ Geoffrey Fisher
Guilt always hurries towards its complement, punishment; only there does its satisfaction lie. ~ Lawrence Durrell
To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves. ~ Federico García Lorca, Blood Wedding and Yerma
For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them. ~ Thomas More, Utopia
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men. ~ George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
I’m not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad – that’s a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad – and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I’m 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good – for that, must I suffer eternal punishment? Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There’s no reason to receive a reward if you’re 57/43 – why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That’s almost impossible to contemplate. ~ Norman Mailer
AMNESTY, n. The state’s magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish ~ Ambrose Bierce
It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it. ~ Anton Chekhov
I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear. ~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky, White Nights
The whole idea of revenge and punishment is a childish daydream. 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 primitive idea of justice is partly legalized revenge and partly expiation by sacrifice. It works out from both sides in the notion that two blacks make a white, and that when a wrong has been done, it should be paid for by an equivalent suffering. It seems to the Philistine majority a matter of course that this compensating suffering should be inflicted on the wrongdoer for the sake of its deterrent effect on other would-be wrongdoers; but a moment’s reflection will shew that this utilitarian application corrupts the whole transaction. For example, the shedding of blood cannot be balanced by the shedding of guilty blood. Sacrificing a criminal to propitiate God for the murder of one of his righteous servants is like sacrificing a mangy sheep or an ox with the rinderpest: it calls down divine wrath instead of appeasing it. In doing it we offer God as a sacrifice the gratification of our own revenge and the protection of our own lives without cost to ourselves; and cost to ourselves is the essence of sacrifice and expiation. ~ George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion
The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment. ~ Edward Bond
Celebrity is the chastisement of merit and the punishment of talent. ~ Emily Dickinson
Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn’t commit. ~ Eli Khamarov
I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment. ~ George Orwell
A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. ~ Oscar Wilde
Just Above Sunset 