Famous Quotes & Sayings

William Gilmore Simms

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

William Ellery Channing

No punishment is so terrible as prosperous guilt.

Saint Francis de Sales

The damned are in the abyss of Hell, as within a woeful city, where they suffer unspeakable torments, in all their senses and members, because as they have employed all their senses and their members in sinning, so shall they suffer in each of them the punishment due to sin.

Saint Augustine

It is not the punishment but the cause that makes the martyr.

Ujjwal Nikam

I am in favour of capital punishment if the execution of the sentence is immediate. The purpose of the death penalty is to send out a message to society.

Robert Mugabe

Was it not enough punishment and suffering in history that we were uprooted and made helpless slaves not only in new colonial outposts but also domestically.

Richard Paul Evans

People aren't wired to be alone. Even in the stressful population of prison, solitary confinement is still considered a cruel punishment.

Saint Augustine

Let us understand that God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.

Russell Johnson

I have great trouble with the people who envision AIDS as a punishment from God.

Robert Baden-Powell

Correcting bad habits cannot be done by forbidding or punishment.

Ric Flair

I can take more punishment than anyone in the business.

Robert Duvall

I wanted to show that crime doesn't pay. If you are saved and accept the Lord, you cannot use that as an excuse to avoid punishment.

Roald Dahl

It is preferable to incur a mild punishment than to perform an onerous task.

Roger Ebert

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there?

Samuel Johnson

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

Samuel Johnson

If misery be the effect of virtue, it ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and if of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced.

Vittorio Alfieri

The guilty is he who meditates a crime; the punishment is his who lays the plot.

Vittorio Alfieri

Disgrace does not consist in the punishment, but in the crime.

William Ralph Inge

There are no rewards or punishments - only consequences.

Walter Savage Landor

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Walter Dean Myers

They take away your shoelaces and your belt so you can’t kill yourself no matter how bad it is. I guess making you live is part of the punishment.

William J. Brennan

Capital punishment...treats members of the human race...as objects to be toyed with and discarded.

William J. Brennan

The principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.

Saint Augustine

The punishment of every disordered mind is its own disorder.

Saint Augustine

Temporal punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by some after death, by some both here and hereafter, but all of them before that last and strictest judgment. But not all who suffer temporal punishments after death will come to eternal punishments, which are to follow after that judgment.

Will Rogers

We don't give our criminals much punishment, but we sure give 'em plenty of publicity.

W. E. B. Du Bois

The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

William Hazlitt

The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives of virtue.

Wendell Berry

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.

William Blackstone

Punishments of unreasonable severity, especially where indiscriminately afflicted, have less effect in preventing crimes, and amending the manners of a people, than such as are more merciful in general, yet properly intermixed with due distinctions of severity.

Werner Herzog

The punishment itself is something I respectfully disagree with, but for thousands and thousands of years it was practiced everywhere.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

To leave no interval between the sentence and the fulfillment of it doth beseem God only, the Immutable!

Terry Pratchett

This was the definition of eternity; it was the space of time devised by the Great God Om to ensure that everyone got the punishment that was due to them.