Famous Quotes & Sayings

Thomas Paine

Lay then the axe to the root, and teach governments humanity. It is their sanguinary punishments which corrupt mankind.

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.

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.

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.

Samuel Johnson

It may be observed in general that the future is purchased by the present. It is not possible to secure distant or permanent happiness but by the forbearance of some immediate gratification. This is so evidently true with regard to the whole of our existence that all precepts of theology have no other tendency than to enforce a life of faith; a life regulated not by our senses but by our belief; a life in which pleasures are to be refused for fear of invisible punishments, and calamities sometimes to be sought, and always endured, in hope of rewards that shall be obtained in another state.

Salvatore J. Cordileone

In places where marriage's core meaning has been altered through legal action, officials are beginning to target for punishment those believers and churches that refuse to adapt.

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 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!

W. S. Gilbert

Let the punishment fit the crime.

William Cowper

Sin let loose speaks punishment at hand.

Thomas Bernhard

I would be the unhappiest person imaginable, confronted daily with disastrous works crying out with errors, imprecision, carelessness, amateurishness. I avoided this punishment by destroying them, I thought, and suddenly I took great pleasure in the word destroying.

Thomas Brooks

He that hath deserved hanging may be glad to escape with a whipping.

Horace

Punishment follows close on crime.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity.

Jeremy Bentham

All punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil.

Jacqueline Carey

And Kushiel sends no punishment that we are not fit to bear.

Christopher Hitchens

Nothing optional -- from homosexuality to adultery -- is ever made punishable unless those who do the prohibiting (and exact the fierce punishment) have a repressed desire to participate.

Gary Becker

Fines are preferable to imprisonment and other types of punishment because they are more efficient. With a fine, the punishment to offenders is also revenue to the State.

Jerzy Kosinski

There must be no worse punishment to a totalitarian nation than the withdrawal of capital.

Jerzy Kosinski

Homelessness is a part of our American system. There should be nothing wrong with this condition as long as the individual is not sentenced to unnecessary suffering and punishment.

Georges Bernanos

Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.

George Sand

death must no longer be either the penalty for prosperity or the consolation of misery. God did not destine it to be either the punishment or the compensation for life ...

Jean Piaget

Punishment renders autonomy of conscience impossible.

Ernst Junger

The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.

Harriet Martineau

I never did a right thing or abstained from a wrong one from any consideration of reward or punishment.