This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau
There will never be a really free and enlightened state until the state comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power an authority are derived, and treats him accordingly.
Authority | Individual | Power | Will |
The object of punishment is, prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Evil | Good | Object | Punishment |
The laws of nature are just, but terrible. There is no weak mercy in them. Cause and consequence are inseparable and inevitable. The elements have no forbearance. The fire burns, the water drowns, the air consumes, the earth buries. And perhaps it would be well for our race if the punishment of crimes against the laws of man were as inevitable as the punishment of crimes against the laws of nature, were man as unerring in his judgments as nature.
Cause | Earth | Forbearance | Inevitable | Man | Mercy | Nature | Punishment | Race |
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
Evil | Good | Object | Punishment |
The severest punishment suffered by a sensitive mind, for injury inflicted upon another, is the consciousness of having done it.
Consciousness | Mind | Punishment |
[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones.
Ambition | Children | Contempt | Disdain | Industry | Knowledge | Little | Spirit | Virtue | Virtue | Ambition | Vice |
We cannot be guilty of a great act of uncharitableness than to interpret the afflictions which befall our neighbors, as punishment and judgments.
Punishment | Guilty |
There are two types of justice: retributive justice and distributive justice. Retributive justice requires punishment for wrongdoing in proportion to the magnitude of the crime... Distributive justice refers to the fair distribution of benefits and burdens in a society.
Crime | Justice | Punishment | Society |
Remorse is the punishment of crime; repentance, its expiation. The former appertains to a tormented conscience; the later to a soul changed for the better.
Better | Conscience | Crime | Punishment | Remorse | Repentance | Soul |
Louis D. Brandeis, fully Louis Dembitz Brandeis
Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that in the administration of the criminal law the end justifies the means – to declare that the government may commit crimes in order to secure the conviction of a private criminal – would bring terrible retribution.
Administration | Anarchy | Contempt | Crime | Government | Law | Man | Means | Order | Government |
Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
It is often more necessary to conceal contempt than resentment; the former is never forgiven, but the latter is sometimes forgotten.
Contempt | Resentment |
Maimonides, given name Moses ben Maimon or Moshe ben Maimon, known as "Rambam" NULL
From the moment an offending scholar receives his punishment, he is your brother. And it is proper the punishment be administered privately, not to diminish his dignity.
Dignity | Punishment | Scholar |
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Let the punishment fit the offence.
Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
Vicious habits are so great a stain to human nature, and so odious in themselves, that every person actuated by right reason would avoid them, though he were sure they; would be always concealed both from God and man, and had no future punishment entailed upon them.
Future | God | Human nature | Man | Nature | Punishment | Reason | Right | God |
A kind of mysterious instinct is supposed to reside in the soul, that instantaneously discerns truth, without the tedious labour of ratiocination. This instinct, for I know not what other name to give it, has been termed common sense, and more frequently, sensibility; and, by a kind of indefeasible right, it has been supposed, for rights of this kind are not easily proved, to reign paramount over the other faculties of the mind, and to be an authority from which there is no appeal.
Authority | Common Sense | Instinct | Mind | Right | Rights | Sense | Sensibility | Soul | Truth |