Famous Quotes & Sayings

Confucius

Guide them by edicts, keep them in line with punishments, and the common people will stay out of trouble but will have no sense of shame. Guide them by virtue, keep them in line with the rites, and they will, besides having a sense of shame, reform themselves.

Andrew Fastow

I wish I could undo what I did at Enron but I can't. I understand that I deserve punishment. Your honor, I accept the prison sentence that you are about to impose and will serve it without bitterness.

Tamora Pierce

Face it," Gary told her kindly. "You'll never catch up. You just do as much as you can and take the punishments without saying anything. Sometimes I wonder if that isn't what they're really trying to teach us--to take plenty and keep our mouths shut.

George R. R. Martin

Sins may be forgiven. Crimes require punishment.

George Eliot

Loquacity with tongue or pen is its own reward -- or, punishment.

J. C. Ryle

The fear of punishment, the desire of reward, the sense of duty, are all useful arguments, in their way, to persuade people to holiness. But they are all weak and powerless, until a person loves Christ.

Georges Bernanos

Purity is not imposed upon us as though it were a kind of punishment, it is one of those mysterious but obvious conditions of that supernatural knowledge of ourselves in the Divine, which we speak of as faith. Impurity does not destroy this knowledge, it slays our need for it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

One is punished best for one's virtues.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

In a well governed state, there are few punishments, not because there are many pardons, but because criminals are rare; it is when a state is in decay that the multitude of crimes is a gaurantee of impunity.

Hosea Ballou

There is no immunity from the consequences of sin; punishment is swift and sure to one and all.

Horace

Punishment closely follows guilt as its companion.

Hannah Arendt

No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.

Gore Vidal

The idea of a good society is something you do not need a religion and eternal punishment to buttress; you need a religion if you are terrified of death.

Giacomo Casanova

God ceases to be God only for those who can admit the possibility of His non-existence, and that conception is in itself the most severe punishment they can suffer.

Honore de Balzac

With every one, the expectation of a misfortune constitutes a dreadful, punishment. Suffering then assumes the proportions of the unknown, which is the soul's infinite.

Hypatia

To rule by fettering the mind through fear of punishment in another world is just as base as to use force.

James Buchanan

All the friends that I loved and wanted to reward are dead, and all the enemies that I hated and I had marked out for punishment are turned to my friends.

J. R. R. Tolkien

What punishments of God are not gifts?

Francis Quarles

Wickedness is its own punishment.

Horace

Do not pursue with the terrible scourge him who deserves a slight whip. [Lat., Ne scutica dignum horribili sectere flagello.]

Horace Mann

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it can never be made impulsive to good.

H. L. Mencken

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor

H. L. Mencken

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

H. L. Mencken

The late William Jennings Bryan, L.L.D., always had one great advantage in controversy; he was never burdened with an understanding of his opponent's case.

George Herbert

Punishment is lame, but it comes.

George Herbert

Service without reward is punishment.

George Herbert

Though punishment be slow, still it comes.

Georg Brandes

Since fresh examples and proofs could always be found of the alleged relation between guilt and punishment: if you behave in such and such a way, it will go badly with you. Now, as it generally does go badly, the allegation was constantly confirmed; and thus popular morality, a pseudo- science on a level with popular medicine, continually gained ground.

Jerry Brown

Banning capital punishment takes us to a higher state of consciousness.

Stella Young

The purpose of our justice system is to reflect the values of our society and to punish those who violate our standards.

Samuel Johnson

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

W. E. B. Du Bois

The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime.

Wendell Berry

We are living even now among punishments and ruins.