Punishment Quotes

“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

“The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
― George Bernard Shaw, The Quintessence of Ibsenism

“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.”
― Sir Thomas More, Utopia

“Young people don't always do what they're told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment. ”
― Rick Riordan

“The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Just because I do not accept the teachings of the devotaries does not mean I've discarded a belief in right and wrong."
"But the Almighty determines what is right!"
"Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is right for it to be right? I believe that my own morality -- which answers only to my heart -- is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.”
― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

“They send a person who can never stay," she whispered. "Who can never accept my offer of companionship for more than a little while. They send me a hero I can't help ... just the sort of person I can't help falling in love with."
...
As I sailed into the lake I realized the Fates really were cruel. They sent Calypso someone she couldn't help but love. But it worked both ways. For the rest of my life I would be thinking about her. She would always be my biggest what if.”
― Rick Riordan, The Battle of the Labyrinth

“I’ll make Goyle do lines, it’ll kill him, he hates writing,” said Ron happily. He lowered his voice to Goyle’s low grunt and, screwing up his face in a look of pained concentration, mimed writing in midair. “I... must... not... look... like... a... baboon’s... backside.”
― J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

“When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.”
― Criss Jami, Salomé: In Every Inch In Every Mile

“There is a point in the history of society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining "punishment" and "being supposed to punish" hurts it, arouses fear in it. "Is it not enough to render him undangerous? Why still punish?
Punishing itself is terrible." With this question, herd morality, the morality of timidity, draws its ultimate consequence.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“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 than the one derived from fear of punishment.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.”
― George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman

“In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.”
― Charles Dickens, Great Expectations

“Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.”
― Anne Rice, The Vampire Lestat

“Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?”
― Jane Nelsen

“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.

It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.”
― Howard Zinn, You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

“Nonsense. Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older, and then before you know it, they're grown.”
― J.M. Barrie

“Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.”
― Pete Walker

“God's creatures who cried themselves to sleep stirred to cry again.”
― Thomas Harris, The Silence of the Lambs

“”
― Neil Gaiman

“I am the flail of god. Had you not created great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.”
― Genghis Khan, Genghis Khan's Rules for (Warriors) Writers

“A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.”
― B.F Skinner, Beyond Freedom and Dignity

“The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon 'Hell and Damnation'—upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do, the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer.

[Essay entitled 'On Christianity', published posthumously]”
― W.E.B. Du Bois, Writings: The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade / The Souls of Black Folk / Dusk of Dawn / Essays and Articles

“Always seek justice, but love only mercy. To love justice and hate mercy is but a doorway to more injustice.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short.”
― Bernardin de Saint Pierre, Paul and Virginia by Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Fiction, Literary

“To punish the oppressors of humanity is clemency; to forgive them is cruelty.”
― Maximilien de Robespierre

“You were destined for me. Perhaps as a punishment.”
― Dostoievski

“I await your sentence with less fear than you pass it. The time will come when all will see what I see.”
― Giordano Bruno

“Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.”
― Thomas Stephen Szasz

“Every night death came, slowly, painfully, and every morning Maddox awoke in bed, knowing he'd have to die again later. That was his greatest curse and his eternal punishment.”
― Gena Showalter, The Darkest Night