Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Punishment

"Disgrace is not in the punishment, but in the crime." -

"Everyone suffers. But many do not take it to heart that the suffering comes as a punishment for transgressions, rather they consider it accidental. The proper attitude is that suffering is an atonement. With this realization a person appreciates that suffering in this world saves him suffering in the next." - Y. Eibeschuetz

"The effects of our actions may be postponed but they are never lost. There is an inevitable reward for good deeds and an inescapable punishment for bad. Meditate upon this truth, and seek always to earn good wages from Destiny." - Wu Ming Fu

"Guilt always looks for punishment, and punishment creates pain." - Louise L. Hay

"To forgive sin is not an act of injustice, though the punishment have been threatened. Even amongst men, though the promise of good bind the promiser; yet threats, that is to say, promises of evil, bind them not; much less shall they bind God, who is infinitely more merciful than men." - Thomas Hobbes

"No man ever knows the few joys of living without some sort of success to his credit. Of all the games worth a candle, success is first. The greatest punishment is to be despised by your neighbors, the world and members of your family." - E. W. Howe, fully Edgar Watson Howe

"If misery be the effect of virtue, it; ought to be reverenced; if of ill-fortune, to be pitied; and of vice, not to be insulted, because it is perhaps itself a punishment adequate to the crime by which it was produced." -

"The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute." -

"No reasonable man would be eager to possess himself of the invidious power of inflicting punishment, if he were not predetermined to make use of it." -

"Vanity indeed is a venial error; for it usually carries its own punishment with it." -

"The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne." - Walter Savage Landor

"Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided." - John Locke

"You have not converted a man, because you have silenced him... The small reform may become the enemy of the great one... The most frightful idea that has ever corroded human nature-the idea of eternal punishment." -

"Speaking generally, punishment hardens and numbs, it produces concentration, it sharpens the consciousness of alienation, it strengthens the power of resistance." -

"The bravery founded on hope of recompense, fear of punishment, experience of success, on rage, or on ignorance of danger, is but common bravery, and does not deserve the name. True bravery proposes a just end; measures the dangers, and meets the result with calmness and unyielding decision." - François de La Noüe

"In the commission of evil, fear no man so much as thyself. Another is but one witness against thee; thou art a thousand. Another thou mayst avoid, thyself thou canst not. Wickedness is its own punishment." - Francis Quarles

"In the commission of evil, fear no man so much as thyself; another is but one witness against thee, thou art a thousand; another thou mayest avoid, thyself thou canst not. Wickedness is its own punishment." - Francis Quarles

"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." -

"Work is not man's punishment. It is his reward and his strength, his glory and his pleasure." -

"Crime can never go unpunished, since the punishment of crime lies in the crime itself." -

"The greatest punishment for having done an injury is the fact of having done it." -

"He who is in evil, is also in the punishment of evil." - Emanuel Swedenborg, born Emanujel Swedberg

"There is a mistaken notion prevailing among some parents that discipline is the same thing as punishment. It is not. Discipline comes from a Latin word meaning "to teach." The best discipline is that which teaches, not the kind that hurts." - J. C. Wynn

"A liar's punishment is that he is not believed even when he tells the truth." - Simeon ben Yohai, aka Simon ben Yohai or Rashbi or Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai

"Thou hast commanded that an ill-regulated mind should be its own punishment." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL

"This is the punishment of a liar: He is not believed, even when he speaks the truth." - Babylonian Talmud

"How many years of fatigue and punishment it takes to learn the simple truth that work, that disagreeable thing, is the only way of not suffering in life, or at all events, of suffering less." - Charles Pierre Baudelaire

"To say that every crime brings its own punishment is by way of being a platitude, and yet in my opinion nothing can be truer." - Agatha Christie, fully Dame Agatha Miller Christie

"The object of punishment is threefold: for just retribution; for the protection of society; for the reformation of the offender." - Tyron Edwards

"Don’t let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?" - George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann or Marian Evans

"Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty." - Henry Ford

"An unrestricted satisfaction of every need presents itself as the most enticing method of conducting one's life, but it means putting enjoyment before caution, and soon brings its own punishment." - Sigmund Freud, born Sigismund Schlomo Freud

"When the law contradicts what most people regard as moral and proper, they will break the law - whether the law is enacted in the name of a noble ideal... or in the naked interest of one group at the expense of another. Only fear of punishment, not a sense of justice and morality, will lead people to obey the law." -

"I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the encroachments on the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in the punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of government." - Thomas Jefferson

"War is as much a punishment to the punisher as to the sufferer." - Thomas Jefferson

"If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender." - John Locke

"The most frightful idea that has ever corroded human nature - the idea of eternal punishment." -

"The opportunity of making happy is more scarce than we imagine; the punishment of missing it is, never to meet with it again; and the use owe make of it leaves us an eternal sentiment of satisfaction or repentance." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"As the love of God is man's highest happiness and blessedness, and the ultimate end and aim of all human actions, it follows that he alone lives by the Divine law who loves God not from fear of punishment, or from love of any other object... but solely because he has knowledge of God." -

"A community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than... by the occasional occurrence of crime." -

"Sin is a suppurating wound; punishment is the surgeon’s knife." -

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein

"The process of forgiveness allows you to turn your heart toward healing, release, and compassion instead of using your energy for revenge or punishment. Forgiveness allows you to build something positive in the present while still making sure not to repeat what happened in the past." - Leonard Felder

"The issue we should all ponder is moral, not legal; responsibility, rather than guilt; prevention rather than punishment." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"Its effects on the soul is to be measured neither by the guilt nor by the temporal punishment inexorably fixed, but by that deep sense of loneliness it brings with it." - Bede Jarrett

"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." -

"One ought to both be feared and loved, but as it is difficult for the two to go together, it is much safer to be feared than loved, if one of the two has to be wanting… Love is held by a chain of obligation, which men being selfish, is broken whenever it serves their purpose; but fear is maintained by a dread of punishment which never fails." - Niccolò Machiavelli, formally Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli

"A people only become unmanageable when one tries to lead them with a violent love…. Bit if one approaches them with trust and takes them by the hand, if one lures them forward with riches and drives them from behind with just punishment… there will not be a single one who will not adapt himself to the ruler." - Mozi or Mo-tze, Mocius or Mo-tzu, original name Mo Di, aka Master Mo NULL