Famous Quotes & Sayings

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Anger should never appear in awarding punishment.

Marcus Tullius Cicero

Let the punishment be proportionate to the offense.

Kevin Mitnick

My argument is not that I shouldn't have been punished, but that the punishment didn't fit the crime.

Mark Twain

Laws are sand, customs are rock. Laws can be evaded and punishment escaped, but an openly transgressed custom brings sure punishment.

Oscar Wilde

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.

Pasquier Quesnel

There is no greater punishment than that of being abandoned to one's self.

Lillian Hellman

If you are willing to take the punishment, you're halfway through the battle. That the issues may be trivial, the battle ugly, is another point.

Laird Barron

Enlightenment is its own reward, its own punishment. You begin to see so much more. And so much more sees you.

Hypatia

To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.

John Paul Stevens

[B]y requiring that an execution be relatively painless, we necessarily protect the inmate from enduring any punishment that is comparable to the suffering inflicted on his victim. This trend, while appropriate and required by the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment, actually undermines the very premise on which public approval of the retribution rationale is based.

John Owen

The purpose of our holy and righteous God was to save his church, but their sin could not go unpunished. It was, therefore, necessary that the punishment for that sin be transferred from those who deserved it but could not bear it, to one who did not deserve it but was able to bear it.

John Milton

Back to thy punishment, False fugitive, and to thy speed add wings.

Norbert Wiener

The sense of tragedy is that the world is not a pleasant little nest made for our protection, but a vast and largely hostile environment, in which we can achieve great things only by defying the gods; and that this defiance inevitably brings its own punishment.

Mitch Albom

She felt worthless and hollow. There was no hope of fixing this. And when hope is gone, time is punishment.

Mitch Albom

When hope is gone, time is punishment.

Sherrilyn Kenyon

I take it that the judgment is an essential point in every conviction, let the punishment be fixed or not.

Nassau William Senior

The state, by relieving idleness, improvidence, or misconduct from punishment, and depriving abstinence and foresight of the reward, which have been provided for them by nature, may indeed destroy wealth, but most certainly will aggravate poverty.

Myrtle Reed

Legislation may at times be disobeyed, but never law, for the breaking brings swift punishment of its own.

Mort Sahl

I'm for capital punishment. You've got to execute people. How else are they going to learn?

John Ruskin

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

Matt Taibbi

Obviously, people who commit crimes should be punished. Even people who steal socks and 'Snow White' videos should probably do time if they have priors, especially serious priors. But the punishment has to fit the crime, and the standard has to be the same for everyone.

Meg Cabot

It’s seemed more like a punishment than a reward most days…” he said, his tone one of bitter resignation. Then his gaze lifted to meet mine, and his voice changed. “…at least until I found you.

Marilyn vos Savant

Capital punishment is the source of many an argument, both good and bad.

Martin Scorsese

The only way I was able to defend myself was to be able to take punishment. Then I got a lot of respect. They said, "Oh, he's okay, he can take it. Don't hit him." The guys were pretty big, and I had asthma.

Peter De Vries

Rather than waste precious time arguing, I went up and started serving my "sentence" without delay. It was usually about an hour for epigrams; somewhat longer for a paradox.

Penn Jillette

Behaving morally because of a hope of reward or a fear of punishment is not morality.

Penn Jillette

If you are doing something for reward or punishment, you do not have morality.

Marlo Thomas

... any woman who accepts aloneness as the natural by-product of success is accepting a punishment for a crime she didn't commit. And she is not acknowledging one of the most precious lessons of the women's movement, the lessons of community ... We may not able to tell women that there is safety in freedom. But we certainly can say, with absolute certainty, that for free women, the only safety is in numbers.

Max Lucado

Christ lived the life we could not live and took the punishment we could not take to offer the hope we cannot resist.

Matthew Henry

Extraordinary afflictions are not always the punishment of extraordinary sins, but sometimes the trial of extraordinary graces.

Michel Foucault

But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.

Michel Foucault

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

Theodore Roosevelt

It is not only highly desirable but necessary that there should be legislation which shall carefully shield the interests of wage-workers, and which shall discriminate in favor of the honest and humane employer by removing the disadvantage under which he stands when compared with unscrupulous competitors who have no conscience and will do right only under fear of punishment.