Famous Quotes & Sayings

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.

Tennessee Williams

How long does it have to go on? This punishment? Haven't I done time enough, haven't I served my term? can't I apply for a-pardon?

Shunryu Suzuki

Hell is not punishment, it's training.

Lady Gregory

Well, there's no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth.

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.

Ronald Reagan

In case anybody asks you about my position on capital punishment, you can tell them I favor it; and if they want to know why, you can tell them this story.

Simone Weil

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.

Simone Weil

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 infliction was just.

Tony Campolo

I contend that it's impossible to read the Sermon on the Mount and not come out against capital punishment.

Stanislaw Jerzy Lec

I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.

Scott Turow

That led me to say that when push comes to shove, I'm against capital punishment.

Tom Tancredo

The word nobody wants to use, but you see if you are here illegally, that's the punishment, deportation.