This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Panopticism is one of the characteristic traits of our society. It's a type of power that is applied to individuals in the form of continuous individual supervision, in the form of control, punishment and compensation, and in the form of correction, that is, the molding and transformation of individuals in terms of certain norms. This threefold aspect of panopticism - supervision, control, correction - seems to be a fundamental and characteristic dimension of the power relations that exist in our society.
Individual | Power | Punishment |
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.
Punishment | Guilty |
Mikhail Naimy, also spelled Mikha'il Na'ima
Love is not a virtue. Love is a necessity; more so than bread and water; more so than light and air. Let no one pride himself on loving. But rather breathe in Love and breathe it out just as unconsciously and freely as you breathe in the air and breathe it out. For Love needs no one to exalt it. Love will exalt the heart that it finds worthy of itself. Seek no rewards for Love. Love is reward sufficient unto Love, as Hate is punishment sufficient unto Hate. Nor keep any accounts with Love. For Love accounts to no one but itself. Love neither lends nor borrows; Love neither buys nor sells; but when it gives, it gives its all; and when it takes, it takes its all. Its very taking is a giving. Its very giving is a taking. Therefore is it the same to-day, tomorrow and forevermore.
Giving | Hate | Heart | Light | Love | Pride | Punishment | Reward | Tomorrow | Will |
Elizabeth Fry, fully Elizabeth "Betsy" Fry, née Gurney
Does Capital punishment tend to the security of the people? By no means. It hardens the hearts of men, and makes the loss of life appear light to them; it renders life insecure, inasmuch as the law holds out that Property is of greater value than life.
Capital punishment | Law | Life | Life | Light | Property | Punishment | Security | Loss | Value |
The only method that proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side [is retaliation]. If we try to search for the [particular] Arab [who planted mines], it has not value. But if we harass the nearby village . . . then the population there comes out against the [infiltrators] . . . and the Egyptian Government and the Transjordanian Government are [driven] to prevent such incidents, because their prestige is [assailed], as the Jews have opened fire, and they are unready to begin a war . . . the method of collective punishment so far has proved effective.
Government | Method | Punishment | Search | War | Government |
Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
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 then the one derived from fear of punishment.
Fear | Love | Power | Punishment |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.
Baseness | Dread | Fear | Obligation | Opportunity | Punishment |
Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
One can say this in general of men: they are ungrateful, disloyal, insincere and deceitful, timid of danger and avid of profit... Love is a bond of obligation that these miserable creatures break whenever it suits them to do so; but fear holds them fast by a dread of punishment that never passes.
Danger | Dread | Fear | Love | Obligation | Punishment | Danger |
A mother's silence is the worst form of punishment for it is left to one's imagination to conjure up what is in her mind.
Imagination | Punishment | Silence |
Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
Since by nature all men are free, all government – whether based on written law or on law embodied in a ruler through whose government the subjects are restrained from evil deeds and their liberty regulated, for a good end by fear of punishment – arises solely from agreement and consent of the subjects.
Deeds | Evil | Fear | Good | Government | Law | Liberty | Men | Nature | Punishment | Deeds | Government |
There is no greater punishment than that of being abandoned to one’s self.
Accept the long night patiently, quietly, humbly, and resignedly as intended for your true good. It is not a punishment for sin committed but an instrument of annihilating egoism.
Punishment | Sin |
Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves.
Fault | Nature | Punishment | Fault |
Peter Geach, fully Peter Thomas Geach
I must first clear up an ambiguity in the phrase 'doing evil that good may come'. We cannot ask whether e. g. Caesar's death was a good or bad thing to happen; there are various titles under which it may be called good or bad. One might very well say e. g. that a violent death was a bad thing to happen to a living organism but a good thing to happen to a man who claimed divine worship, and this would again leave it open whether doing Caesar to death was a good or bad thing to do for Brutus and the rest. Now when I speak of 'not doing evil that good may come', what I mean is that certain sorts of act are such bad things to do that they must never be done to secure any good or avoid any evil. For A to kill a man or cut off his arm is not necessarily a bad thing to do, though it is necessarily bad that such a thing should happen to a living organism. Only by a fallacy of equivocation can people argue that if you accept the principle of not doing evil that good may come, then you must be against capital punishment and surgical operations.
Ambiguity | Capital punishment | Death | Equivocation | Evil | Fallacy | Good | Kill | Man | People | Punishment |
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Seven kinds of punishment come upon the world for seven classes of transgression. If some give tithe and some do not give tithe, there comes famine from drought. Some hunger while some have a sufficiency. When all resolve not to give tithes there comes famine from tumult and drought. And if they will not set apart drought offerings (Numbers 15:20) there comes an all-consuming famine.
Hunger | Punishment | Will | World |
Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" NULL
Seven kinds of punishment come upon the world for seven classes of transgression. If some give tithe and some do not give tithe, there comes famine from drought. Some hunger while some have a sufficiency. When all resolve not to give tithes there comes famine from tumult and drought. And if they will not set apart drought offerings (Numbers 15:20) there comes an all-consuming famine.
Hunger | Punishment | Will | World |
Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death.
Belief | People | Punishment |
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
It is by the aid of iron that we construct houses, cleave rocks, and perform so many other useful offices of life. But it is with iron also that wars, murders, and robberies are effected, and this, not only hand to hand, but from a distance even, by the aid of missiles and winged weapons, now launched from engines, now hurled by the human arm, and now furnished with feathery wings. This last I regard as the most criminal artifice that has been devised by the human mind; for, as if to bring death upon man with still greater rapidity, we have given wings to iron and taught it to fly. ... Nature, in conformity with her usual benevolence, has limited the power of iron, by inflicting upon it the punishment of rust; and has thus displayed her usual foresight in rendering nothing in existence more perishable, than the substance which brings the greatest dangers upon perishable mortality.
Aid | Artifice | Conformity | Death | Existence | Foresight | Man | Nothing | Power | Punishment | Regard |
Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
It is advantageous that the gods should be believed to attend to the affairs of man; and the punishment of evil deeds, though sometimes late, is never fruitless.
Evil | Punishment |
We are concerned here only with the imposition of capital punishment for the crime of murder, and when a life has been taken deliberately by the offender; we cannot say that the punishment is invariably disproportionate to the crime. It is an extreme sanction suitable to the most extreme of crimes.
Capital punishment | Crime | Extreme | Life | Life | Punishment |