All in all, punishment hardens and renders people more insensible; it concentrates; it increases the feeling of estrangement; it strengthens the power of resistance.
And where the offence is, let the great axe fall.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime.
Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one.
Distrust everyone in whom the impulse to punish is powerful!
Every guilty person is his own hangman.
Hanging is too good for him said Mr. Cruelty.
He must have known me if he had seen me as he was wont to see me, for he was in the habit of flogging me constantly. Perhaps he did not recognize me by my face.
Hold you there, neither a strange hand nor my own, neither heavy nor light shall touch my bum.
I should be very willing to redress men wrongs, and rather check than punish crimes, had not Cervantes, in that all too true tale of Quixote, shown how all such efforts fail.
I'm all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.
If he who breaks the law is not punished, he who obeys it is cheated. This, and this alone, is why lawbreakers ought to be punished: to authenticate as good, and to encourage as useful, law-abiding behavior. The aim of criminal law cannot be correction or deterrence; it can only be the maintenance of the legal order.
If your buttocks burn, you know you have done wrong.
In its function, the power to punish is not essentially different from that of curing or educating.
It is the crime not the scaffold which is the disgrace.
Let the punishment be proportionate to the offense.
Let us have compassion for those under chastisement. Alas, who are we ourselves? Who am I and who are you? Whence do we come and is it quite certain that we did nothing before we were born? This earth is not without some resemblance to a gaol. Who knows but that man is a victim of divine justice? Look closely at life. It is so constituted that one senses punishment everywhere.
Many without punishment, none without sin.
Men are not hanged for stealing horses, but that horses may not be stolen.