Quotes About Punishment

Far different is the power of our sovereignty. It can interfere with no one's faith, prescribe forms of worship for no one's observance, inflict no punishment but after well-ascertained guilt, the result of investigation under rules prescribed by the Constitution itself.

Death is not only an unusually severe punishment, unusual in its pain, in its finality and in its enormity, but it serves no penal purpose more effectively than a less severe punishment; therefore the principle inherent in the clause that prohibits pointless infliction of excessive punishment when less severe punishment can adequately achieve the same purposes invalidates the punishment.

This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality. We do not punish the leopard for its wildness.

keep me on the payroll, but I could not stay there, not as a charity case. Laurie might be able to go back to teaching, but we would not be able to pay the bills on her income alone. This is an aspect of crime stories I never fully appreciated until I became one: it is so ruinously expensive to mount a defense that, innocent or guilty, the accusation is itself a devastating punishment. Every defendant pays a price.

In court, the thing we punish is the criminal intention. -the mens rea, the guilty mind. There is an ancient rule: actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea - "the act does not create guilt unless the mind is also guilty." That is why we do not convict children, drunks, and schizophrenics: they are incapable of deciding to commit their crimes with a true understanding of the significance of their actions. Free will is as important to the law as it is to religion or any other code of morality.

It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment <...>, the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom, with the redemption from sin, with the romanticizing of many form of labor, and with the ultimate salvation of humankind.

In American prisons, which are extraordinarily violent places, the most vicious form of punishment is simply to lock a person in an empty room for years with absolutely nothing to do. This emptying of any possibility of communication or meaning is the real essence of what violence really is or does.

The violence that Jesus endured only makes sense if you understand that here was God taking upon himself the punishment for the sins of humanity. He would do anything to be reconnected with those he loves – even die for them.

Many activities were forbidden on the Sabbath: work, play, and unnecessary travel. Even minor instances of Sabbath-breaking were punished with much severity. The Essex County Court indicted a man for carrying a burden on the Sabbath, and punished a woman for brewing on the Lord's Day. When Ebenezer Taylor of Yarmouth, Massachusetts, fell into a forty-foot well, his rescuers stopped digging on Saturday afternoon while they debated whether it was lawful to rescue him on the Sabbath. Other

Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher; but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.

At present they [philosophers] seem to be in a very lamentable condition, and such as the poets have given us but a faint notion of in their descriptions of the punishment of Sisyphus and Tantalus. For what can be imagin'd more tormenting, than to seek with eagerness, what for ever flies us; and seek for it in a place, where 'tis impossible it can ever exist?

Because the humiliations and the punishments inflicted on the Germans this time will be even worse than those that followed Versailles;

Storms are not punishment for lack of obedience; oftentimes they are the result of obedience!

Can a machine, educated through a system of reward and punishment, be said to be able to think? Are children, when they cry or laugh, revealing some spark of soul that distinguishes them from machines, or simply following "rules of behavior" with which we as spectators empathize because we are familiar with them? Or to put it another way, does asking whether computers think require us to ask, as well, whether humans compute?

There is a difference between grace and mercy. Mercy is the decision of God not to punish us. But grace is the decision of God to save and bless us.

Guilt: punishing yourself before God doesn't.

God is punishing me for my past wickedness by keeping me alive and in as much pain as he can.

Hell is not filled with people who are deeply sorry for their sins. It is filled with people who for all eternity still shake their puny fist in the face of God Almighty.

Instrument flying is an unnatural act probably punishable by God.

A god of kindness would be charitable to all. Your god of wrath and punishment is but a monstrous phantasy.

Let us understand that God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.

God does not punish us for our sins but by them.