Quotes About Punishment

The worst punishment was his state of helplessness in the face of risks and unfairness.

the person who made a false accusation was punished as if he committed the exact crime.

on how human nature knows no upper bound, as if to punish itself.

Too much success is the enemy (think of the punishment meted out on the rich and famous); too much failure is demoralizing. I would like the option of having neither.

possessions make us worry about downside, thus acting as a punishment as we depend on them.

Repeated punishment, while it crushes the hatred of a few, stirs the hatred of all … just as trees that have been trimmed throw out again countless branches." For revolutions feed on repression, growing heads faster and faster as one literally cuts a few off by killing demonstrators. There is an Irish revolutionary song that encapsulates the effect: The higher you build your barricades, the stronger we become.

We recognize that families in which reality is often denied and consciousness often punished place devastating obstacles to self-esteem; they create a nightmare world in which the child may feel that thinking is not only futile but dangerous.

Gott hat mir das Kind gegeben!, schrie sie. Er gab es mir als Ausgleich für alles, was ihr mir genommen habt! Sie ist meine Freude!- sie ist auch meine Qual! Pearl hält mich in diesem Leben. Und Pearl bestraft mich. Seht ihr nicht, sie ist der Scharlachbuchstabe, imstande nur, geliebt zu werden, und darum millionenfach ausgestattet mit der Macht, mich für meine Sünden zu bestrafen. Ihr werdet sie mir nicht nehmen! Eher sterbe ich!

On the other hand, a penalty which, in our days, would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule, might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself.

There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature - whatever be the delinquencies of the individual - no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do so.

Here, she said to herself, had been the scene of her guilt, and here should be the scene of her earthly punishment; and so, perchance, the torture of her daily shame would at length purge her soul, and work out another purity than that which she had lost: more saint-like, because the result of martyrdom.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Let God punish! Thou shalt forgive!

The scarlet letter had not done its office.

There can be no outrage, methinks, against our common nature--whatever be the delinquencies of the individual--no outrage more flagrant than to forbid the culprit to hide his face for shame; as it was the essence of this punishment to do.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

So something that never should have happened did, all because of my thoughts and actions. A clear-cut cause-and-effect relationship. I was the one who caused it, and I should probably get the death penalty. Or maybe what I should say is I'm the one who pronounced the death sentence on myself

Men impose deception on women and punish them for being deceived, force them down to the lowest level and punish them for falling so low, bind them in marriage and then chastise them with menial service for life, or insults, or blows.

Everybody has to die. I prefer to die for a crime I have committed rather than to die for one of the crimes which you have committed.

shouldn't the punishment for failure be the awful knowledge of that failure?

He had set out to be judge and jury – the consequence for those who knew no consequences.

The punishment for making something barely edible was having to eat it yourself.

How is a scythe disciplined?" Rowan had asked. "He was put to death twelvefold by a jury of scythes, then revived each time. After the twelfth revival, he was on probation for a year.

our sins are manufactured in heaven to create our own hell.