This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"A wounded conscience is often inflicted as a punishment for lack of true repentance; great is the difference betwixt a man’s being frightened at and humbled for his sins." - Thomas Fuller
"As virtue is its own reward, so vice is its own punishment." - Thomas Fuller
"Fear succeeds crime - it is its punishment." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"Fear follows (succeeds) crime, and is its punishment." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"The punishment of criminals should be of use; when a man is hanged he is good for nothing." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL
"My child can be no more guilty or deserving of punishment for my sin than he can see with my eyes and feel with my nerves." - Washington Gladden
"Assuredly, he, who is only kept from vice by the fear of punishment, is no wise acted on by love, and by no means embraces virtue. For my own part, I avoid or endeavor to avoid vice, because it is at direct variance with my proper nature and would lead me astray from the knowledge and love of God." -
"The twin concepts of sin and vindictive punishment seem to be at the root of much that is most vigorous, both in religion and politics. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell
"Prefer punishment to disgraceful gain; for the one is painful but once, but the other for one's whole life." - Chilon of Lacedemon NULL
"Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"That thing of hell and eternal punishment is the most absurd, as well as the most disagreeable thought that ever entered into the head of mortal man. " - George Berkeley, also Bishop Berkeley, Bishop of Cloyne
"Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other." - Haim Ginott, fully Haim G. Ginott, orignially Ginzburg
"The law does not fawn on the noble; the string does not yield to the crooked. Whatever the law applies to, the wise cannot reject nor can the brave defy. Punishment for fault never skips ministers, reward for good never misses commoners. Therefore, to correct the faults of the high, to rebuke the vices of the low, to suppress disorders, to decide against mistakes, to subdue the arrogant, to straighten the crooked, and to unify the folkways of the masses, nothing could match the law. To warn the officials and overawe the people, to rebuke obscenity and danger, and to forbid falsehood and deceit, nothing could match penalty. If penalty is severe, the noble cannot discriminate against the humble. If law is definite, the superiors are esteemed and not violated. If the superiors are not violated, the sovereign will become strong and able to maintain the proper course of government. Such was the reason why the early kings esteemed legalism and handed it down to posterity. Should the lord of men discard law and practice selfishness, high and low would have no distinction. Hence to govern the state by law is to praise the right and blame the wrong." - Han Fei, also Han Fei Zi, Han Feitzu and Han Fei Tzu
"If I were not an atheist, I would believe in a God who would choose to save people on the basis of the totality of their lives and not the pattern of their words. I think he would prefer an honest and righteous atheist to a TV preacher whose every word is God, God, God, and whose every deed is foul, foul, foul. I would also want a God who would not allow a Hell. Infinite torture can only be a punishment for infinite evil, and I don't believe that infinite evil can be said to exist even in the case of Hitler. Besides, if most human governments are civilized enough to try to eliminate torture and outlaw cruel and unusual punishments, can we expect anything less of an all-merciful God? I feel that if there were an afterlife, punishment for evil would be reasonable and of a fixed term. And I feel that the longest and worst punishment should be reserved for those who slandered God by inventing Hell." - Isaac Asimov, born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov
"All punishment is mischief; all punishment in itself is evil." - Jeremy Bentham
"An unbelieved truth can hurt a man much more than a lie. It takes great courage to back truth unacceptable to our times. There's a punishment for it, and it's usually crucifixion" - John Steinbeck, fully John Ernst Steinbeck
"It is the common fate of the indolent to see their rights become a prey to the active. The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime and the punishment of his guilt. " - John Philpot Curran
"Divine punishment is at once followed by Divine pity." - Joseph H. Hertz, fully Rabbi Joseph Herman Hertz
"Theoretically, religion wishes to make men serene and inwardly peaceful by reaching a loving and forgiving god. But in practice, there is too much undissolved wrath and punishment in most religions." - Joshua L. Liebman, fully Joshua Loth Liebman
"Vanity indeed is a venial error; for it usually carries its own punishment with it. " - Junius, psyeudonym of unknown English Political Writer NULL
"If the punishment does not fall on the offender himself, it falls on his sons; if not on the sons, on his grandsons." - Laws of Manu, aka Manusmṛti, Manusmriti, Manusmruti or Mānava-Dharmaśāstra NULL
"It is an open question whether any behavior based on fear of eternal punishment can be regarded as ethical or should be regarded as merely cowardly." - Margaret Mead
"Civilization is built on a number of ultimate principles...respect for human life, the punishment of crimes against property and persons, the equality of all good citizens before the law...or, in a word justice." - Max Nordau, fully Max Simon Nordau, born Simon Maximilian Südfeld
"The goal of a good society is to structure social relations and institutions so that cooperative and generous impulses are rewarded, while antisocial ones are discouraged. The problem with capitalism is that it best rewards the worst part of us: ruthless, competitive, conniving, opportunistic, acquisitive drives, giving little reward and often much punishment -- or at least much handicap -- to honesty, compassion, fair play, many forms of hard work, love of justice, and a concern for those in need." - Michael Parenti
"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
"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." - Michel Foucault
"Together with war [the death penalty] was for a long time the other form of the right of the sword; it constituted the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will, his law, or his person... As soon as power gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being and the logic of its exercise - and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings - made it more difficult to apply the death penalty. How could power exercise its highest prerogatives by putting people to death, when its main role was to ensure, sustain and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such a power, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction. Hence capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking less the enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility, and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those who represented a kind of biological danger to others." - Michel Foucault
"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." - Mikhail Naimy, also spelled Mikha'il Na'ima
"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." - Mahatma Gandhi, fully Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, aka Bapu
"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." - Moshe Dayan
"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." - Elizabeth Fry, fully Elizabeth "Betsy" Fry, née Gurney
"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." - Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
"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. " - 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. " - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli
"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." - Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
"There is no greater punishment than that of being abandoned to one’s self." - Pasquier Quesnel
"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. " - Paul Brunton, born Hermann Hirsch, wrote under various pseudonyms including Brunton Paul, Raphael Meriden and Raphael Delmonte
"Only nature knows how to justly proportion to the fault the punishment it deserves." - Percy Bysshe Shelley
"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." - Peter Geach, fully Peter Thomas Geach
"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. " - 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. " - Pirke Avot, "Verses of the Fathers" or "Ethics of the Fathers" 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." - 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. " - Pliny the Elder, full name Casus Plinius Secundus NULL
"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." - Polybius NULL
"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." - Potter Stewart
"The effort necessary to remain uncorrupted in an environment where fear is an integral part of everyday existence is not immediately apparent to those fortunate enough to live in states governed by the rule of law. Just laws do not merely prevent corruption by meting out impartial punishment to offenders. They also help to create a society in which people can fulfill the basic requirements necessary for the preservation of human dignity without recourse to corrupt practices. Where there are no such laws, the burden of upholding the principles of justice and common decency falls on the ordinary people. It is the cumulative effect on their sustained effort and steady endurance which will change a nation where reason and conscience are warped by fear into one where legal rules exist to promote man's desire for harmony and justice while restraining the less desirable destructive traits in his nature." - Daw Aung San Suu Kyi
"In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development." - Alice Miller, née Rostovski