#punish

When someone beats a rug, the blows are not against the rug, but against the dust in it. ↗

— Rumi

#love #love-is-like-a-lawsuit #rumi #love

[Referring to the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde] ... Will civilization never reach humane ideals? Will men always punish most severely the sins they do not understand and which hold forth for them no temptation? Did Jesus suffer in vain? ↗

— Frank Harris

#homosexuality #punishment #sins #temptation #men

To kill for murder is an immeasurably greater evil than the actual crime itself. Judicial murder is immeasurably more horrible than one committed by a robber. Someone killed by a robber, knifed at night in forest or somewhere, certainly keeps hoping for a rescue right up to the last second. There have been instances of people whose throats have been cut still hoping for rescue right up to the last second. There have been instances of people whose throats have been cut still hoping, or running away, or pleading for their lives. But all this final hope, which makes dying ten times easier is taken away by that certain; the sentence is pronounced and the whole agony resides in the fact that there’s no escape. There is no greater torture in the world than that. Fetch a soldier and stand him right in front of a cannon during a battle and fire at him, he’ll go on hoping; but read out a certain death sentence to that same soldier and he’ll go off his head or bust into tears. Who can say that human nature can bear such a thing like that without going mad? Why this disgusting pointless, unnecessary mockery? Perhaps there exists a man who has had his sentence read out to him and been allowed to suffer before being told: “Be off, you’ve been pardoned.” That man could tell you perhaps. Christ himself spoke of such agony and terror. No, a man should not be treated so! ↗

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#death

I concentrate intently on counting: hearing my voice break as the torment and torture builds; fingering myself intensely at his instruction. As we get past ten I slip up; overwhelmed by the sensations wracking my body, I realise in horror that I don’t know which number is next. ↗

— Felicity Brandon

#bdsm #punishment #spanking #bdsm

With his final blow delivered, he pulls me up toward him, first by my hips, and then by my hair. Groping my breasts and kissing me, he is full of congratulations. ‘Well done, Megan, you took your punishment well. Now it’s time for your reward. ↗

— Felicity Brandon

#bdsm-sex #boss-employee #punishment #spanking #bdsm

I knew quite well, when I gave the names of our agents in the Soviet Union, that I was exposing them to the full machinery of counterespionage and the law, and then prosecution and capital punishment. ↗

— Aldrich Ames

#capital #capital punishment #exposing #full #gave

So long as there are earnest believers in the world, they will always wish to punish opinions, even if their judgment tells them it is unwise and their conscience that it is wrong. ↗

— Walter Bagehot

#believers #conscience #earnest #even #judgment

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. ↗

— Hannah Arendt

#been #commission #contrary #could #crime

We don't want to go back to the same policies and the same practices that drove our economy into a ditch, that punished the middle class, and that led us to this catastrophe. We have to keep moving forward. ↗

— David Axelrod

#catastrophe #class #ditch #drove #economy

So the question is, First, Whether the civil magistrate hath power to force men in things religious to do contrary to their conscience, and if they will not to punish them in their goods, liberties, or lives? this we hold in the negative. ↗

— Robert Barclay

#conscience #contrary #first #force #goods