Punishment Quotes - page 27
Opponents of capital punishment argue that the state has no right to take a murderer's life. Apparently, one fact that abolitionists forget or overlook is that the state is acting not only on behalf of society, but also on behalf of the murdered person and the murdered person's family.
Dennis Prager
The United States participated actively and effectively in the negotiation of Convention. It marks a significant step in the development during this century of international measures against torture and other inhuman treatment or punishment. Ratification of the Convention by the United States will clearly express United States opposition to torture, an abhorrent practice unfortunately still prevalent in the world today.
Ronald Reagan
He loved us when we hated Him, and also continues to love us... And how comes it, some will say, that one who is our Friend threatens hell, and punishment, and vengeance? It is owing to His loving us alone. For all He does and is busied with, is with a view to strike out your wickedness, and to refrain with fear, as with a kind of bridle, your inclinableness to the worse side, and by blessings and by pains recovering you from your downward course, and leading you up to Him, and keeping you from all vice, which is worse than hell.
John Chrysostom
Persecution has come upon us, right honorable brethren, and persecution in the severest form. Shepherds are persecuted that their flocks may be scattered. And the worst of all is that those who are being treated ill cannot accept their sufferings in proof of their testimony, nor can the people reverence the athletes as in the army of martyrs, because the name of Christians is applied to the persecutors. The one charge which is now sure to secure severe punishment is the careful keeping of the traditions of the Fathers.
Basil of Caesarea
I advocate training in arms for those who believe in the method of violence. I would rather have India resort to arms in order to defend her honor than that she should in a cowardly manner become or remain a helpless witness to her own dishonor.
But I believe that nonviolence is infinitely superior to violence, forgiveness is more manly than punishment, forgiveness adorns a soldier. But abstinence is forgiveness only when there is the power to punish, it is meaningless when it pretends to proceed from a helpless creature. A mouse hardly forgives cat when it allows itself to be torn to pieces by her. ... I do not believe myself to be a helpless creature. Only I want to use India's and my strength for better purpose.
Let me not be misunderstood. Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
Mahatma Gandhi
Though it took a decade to find bin Laden, there is one consolation for his long evasion of justice: He lived long enough to witness what some are calling the Arab Spring, the complete repudiation of his violent ideology.
As we debate how the United States can best influence the course of the Arab Spring, can't we all agree that the most obvious thing we can do is stand as an example of a nation that holds an individual's human rights as superior to the will of the majority or the wishes of government? Individuals might forfeit their life as punishment for breaking laws, but even then, as recognized in our Constitution's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, they are still entitled to respect for their basic human dignity, even if they have denied that respect to others.
John McCain
![Justice Blackmun begins his statement [declaring Blackmun's opposition to capital punishment] by describing with poignancy the death of a convicted murderer by lethal injection. He chooses, as the case in which to make that statement, one of the less brutal of the murders that regularly come before us, the murder of a man ripped by a bullet suddenly and unexpectedly, with no opportunity to prepare himself and his affairs, and left to bleed to death on the floor of a tavern. The death-by-injection which Justice Blackmun describes looks pretty desirable next to that. It looks even better next to some of the other cases currently before us, which Justice Blackmun did not select as the vehicle for his announcement that the death penalty is always unconstitutional, for example, the case of the 11-year-old girl raped by four men and then killed by stuffing her panties down her throat. See McCollum v. North Carolina. How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that! (Antonin Scalia)](https://cdn.quotesdtb.com/img/quotes_images_webp/70/antonin-scalia-announcement-bleed-1014370.webp)
There are in existence two distinct ideas of justice. We say that an award is unjust when it penalizes the innocent, rewards the guilty, or when, in general, it fails to be meted out in exact proportion to the merit or guilt in question. On the other hand, we say that a division is unjust when it favors some at the expense of others. In this second adaptation of the term, the idea of justice implies only the idea of equality. In the first acceptation of the term, the notion of justice is inseparable from that of the reward and punishment, and is defined by the correlation between acts and their retribution.
Jean Piaget
Logically, the "infantilization" of the culprit implied by the notion of punishment demands that he should have a corresponding right to a reward, in the absence of which the initial procedure will prove ineffective and may even lead to results contrary to those that were hoped for. Our system is the height of absurdity, since we treat the culprit both as a child, so as to have the right to punish him, and as an adult, in order to deny him consolation; and we believe we have made great spiritual progress because, instead of eating a few of our fellow-men, we subject them to physical and moral mutilation.
Claude Lévi-Strauss
There were severed hands in the Congo, at the time of the Independent State... by the Officers of the Force Publique, to prevent the waste of ammunition to which their soldiers willingly let go, demanded that they provide proof that they had used their cartridges correctly. The proof was the severed hand of the killed enemy ... Severed hands, it will be noted, never constituted a form of punishment. ... By emphasizing, as they did, on the theme of severed hands - a theme which, we realize, easily provoked emotion -, Morel and his friends gave birth to the ambiguity which finally spread and lasted until our days: the idea that Leopold II had his hands cut off in the Congo, that it was a question of torture inflicted on the population, and even of torture most characteristic of the regime.
Leopold II of Belgium
Things will be restored to their proper order. The guilty will not triumph; will not escape the general opprobrium, nor the punishment which is due to their crimes: and an ample recompense will be given to the just man, in the clear and distinct view of an astonished and admiring universe.
Jean Baptiste Massillon
Sadomasochism has always been the furthest reach of the sexual experience: when sex becomes most purely sexual, that is, severed from personhood, from relationships, from love. It should not be surprising that it has become attached to Nazi symbolism in recent years. Never before was the relation of masters and slaves so consciously aestheticized. Sade had to make up his theater of punishment and delight from scratch, improvising the decor and costumes and blasphemous rites. Now there is a master scenario available to everyone. The color is black, the material is leather, the seduction is beauty, the justification is honesty, the aim is ecstasy, the fantasy is death.
Susan Sontag
I was a sitting target, in a way, for anybody who wanted to make some kind of headline. ... I certainly never supported the Fatwa, but when I was asked about ... the actual principle of blasphemy and capital punishment, well, like the Bible, I said, "You know, yeah, it's there, it's in the Koran." And I couldn't deny that.
Cat Stevens
The Quran is the greatest honor and respect for the Muslims Muslims can also sacrifice their life for their religion a religious, social, civil, commercial, military, judicial, criminal, and penal code. It regulates every thing, from the ceremonies of religion to those of daily life, from the salvation of the soul to the health of the body, from the rights of all to those of each individual from morality to crime; from punishment here to that in the life to come, and our Holy Prophet Mohammad (Peace by upon Him) has enjoined on us that every Musalman should posses a copy of the Quran and be his own priest. Therefore, Islam is not merely confined to the spiritual tenets and doctrines or ritual and ceremonies. It is a complete code regulating the whole Muslim society, every department of life, collective and individual.
Muhammad Ali Jinnah
Domitian of Galatia, formerly bishop of Ancyra... in the book which he wrote to Vigilius, where he is complaining of those who contradicted the doctrine of Origen,--who maintained that the souls of men had pre-existed in some state of blessedness before they came into bodies, and that all those who were doomed to the eternal punishment should, together with the devil and his angels, be restored to their former state of blessedness,--he says, They have hastily run out to anathematize most holy and glorious teachers on account of those doctrines which have been advanced concerning pre-existence and restitution; and this indeed under pretext of Origen, but thereby anathematizing all those saints who were before and have been after him.
Origen
Of course for the real criminals, like Boesky, Levine and Milken, who steal hundreds of billions, the punishment is a slap on the wrist, a few months in one of zoo's country club prisons. As the only reason they were prosecuted at all is because they were too blatant, not properly discreet.
David Lane (white nationalist)
Origen understood it well, having been a pupil of Ammonius Saccas; therefore we see him bravely denying the perpetuity of hell-torments. He maintains that not only men, but even devils (by which term he meant disembodied human sinners), after a certain duration of punishment shall be pardoned and finally restored to heaven. ("De Civit. Dei," I, xxi., c. 17.) In consequence of this and other such heresies Origen was, as a matter of course, exiled. (p. 705)
Origen, Clemens Alexandrinus, Chalcidius, Methodius, and Maimonides, on the authority of the Targum of Jerusalem, the orthodox and greatest authority of the Jews, held that the first two words in the book of Genesis--B-RASIT, mean Wisdom, or the Principle. And that the idea of these words meaning "in the beginning" was never shared but by the profane, who were not allowed to penetrate any deeper into the esoteric sense of the sentence. (p. 727)
Origen
This way, Godse (born 1910) exacted ‘punishment' for Gandhi's alleged pro-Muslim policies. These were particularly his acceptance in June 1947 of the plan to partition India into a secular state, retaining the name India and a Muslim state called Pakistan; and more immediately his fast, earlier in January 1948, on behalf of the safety of the Delhi Muslims threatened by angry Hindu refugees pouring in from Pakistan, and in support of Pakistan's demand that India pay them ₹550 million as their share from the treasury of British India. Under protest, the Indian Government had given in to the latter demand because of Gandhi's pressure, and in spite of the presence of Pakistani invasion troops on Indian territory in Kashmir. Surely this was the first time in history that a country deliberately financed its battlefield opponent, and not everyone was pleased with this display of Gandhian values.
Koenraad Elst
I'm not interested in absolute moral judgments. Just think of what it means to be a good man or a bad one. What, after all, is the measure of difference? The good guy may be 65 per cent good and 35 per cent bad-that's a very good guy. The average decent fellow might be 54 per cent good, 46 per cent bad-and the average mean spirit is the reverse. So say I'm 60 per cent bad and 40 per cent good-for that, must I suffer eternal punishment?
Norman Mailer
