...this new idea of cure instead of punishment, so humane in seeming, had in fact deprived the criminal of all rights and by taking away the name Punishment made the thing infinite.
In order to protect the righteous and also to punish the wicked, I incarnate myself on this Earth from time to time.
It matters not how straight the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the Captain of my soul.
- Willian Ernest Henley (1875)
Pain is not a punishment; pleasure is not a reward.
Praise in public; punish in private.
In his Philosophy of Style, Herbert Spencer gives two sentences to illustrate how the vague and general can be turned into the vivid and particular: In proportion as the manners, customs, and amusements of a nation are cruel and barbarous, the regulations of its penal code will be severe. In proportion as men delight in battles, bullfights, and combats of gladiators, will they punish by hanging, burning, and the rack.
ROSALIND But are you so much in love as your rhymes speak? ORLANDO Neither rhyme nor reason can express how much. ROSALIND Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do: and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is, that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
It is forbidden to kill; therefore all murderers are punished unless they kill in large numbers and to the sound of trumpets.
Virtue is not always rewarded nor evil punished.
If a reward is tangibly real enough, a person will work harder to receive that reward than he will to avoid punishment.
The six phases of a project: 1. Enthusiasm 2. Disillusionment 3. Panic 4. Search for the Guilty 5. Punishment of the innocent 6. Praise and Honors for the Non-Participants
"The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times."
Back [in pre-Revolutionary America] "cruel and unusual punishment" meant the rack and burning at the stake . . . in more recent rulings [it has] been taken to mean the absence of cable television and denial of sex-change operations, or just overcrowding in the prisons.
[Jurors who are opposed to capital punishment are] more likely to believe that a defendant's failure to testify is indicative of his guilt, more hostile to the insanity defense, more mistrustful of defense attorneys and less concerned about the danger of erroneous convictions.
Men are rewarded or punished not for what they do but for how their acts are defined. That is why men are more interested in better justifying themselves than in better behaving themselves.
It is not only vain, but wicked, in a legislator to frame laws in opposition to the laws of nature, and to arm them with the terrors of death. This is truly creating crimes in order to punish them.
When another person makes you suffer, it is because he suffers deeply within himself, and his suffering is spilling over. He does not need punishment; he needs help. That's the message he is sending.
He who governs himself according to what he calls his principles may be punished either by one party or the other for those very principles. He who proceeds without principle, as chance, timidity, or self-preservation directs, will not perhaps fare better; but he will be less blamed.
My object all sublime I shall achieve in time- To let the punishment fit the crime- The punishment fit the crime.
Women punish themselves for the failure to conform.
Abortion sheds that innocent blood. Now, as a servant of the Lord, I dutifully warn those who advocate and practice abortion that they incur the wrath of Almighty God, who declared, "If men... hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her . . . he shall be surely punished."
Education Many believe our entire public-education establishment is going in exactly the wrong direction. Rather, having a goal of real achievement, the trend seems to be toward reaching some kind of educational parity, to make sure no students feel badly about themselves. The liberal educational theoreticians tell you that bad grades only serve to discourage underachievers. The primary objective of Outcome-Based Education is to avoid humiliating a student. We should be educating the student first. Students are passing courses and graduating because of lower requirements, because of this new philosophical belief that no one should be held back. Colleges and universities are finding out that a high-school diploma is meaningless in terms of real achievement. The liberal school establishment lowers standards, ignores human nature, refuses to reward success and doesn't punish failure.
Happiness is not a reward - it is a consequence. Suffering is not a punishment - it is a result.
Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens with the flower of the pleasure that concealed it.
Perhaps we're too embarrassed to change or too frightened of the consequences of showing that we actually care. But why not risk it anyway? Begin Today. Carry out a random act of seemingly senseless kindness, with no expectation or reward or punishment. Safe in the knowledge that one day, someone somewhere might do the same for you.
It is as expedient that a wicked man be punished as that a sick man be cured by a physician; for all chastisement is a kind of medicine.
O sir, we should have fine times, indeed, if, to punish tyrants, it were only sufficient to assemble the people! Your arms, wherewith you could defend yourselves, are gone. . . . Did you ever read of any revolution in a nation . . . inflicted by those who had no power at all?
