#punishment

The generality of men are naturally apt to be swayed by fear rather than reverence, and to refrain from evil rather because of the punishment that it brings than because of its own foulness. ↗

— Aristotle

#because #brings #evil #fear #generality

The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else. ↗

— George Bernard Shaw

#believe #believed #cannot #else #least

I lay in bed that night, a first-time drunkard at seven years of age, pondering the punishment I knew would arrive on callused palms. In the forest, as if sensing my plight, wolves howled nocturnal laments. The magnificent lunar lullabies of my lupine brethren wooed me into a deep and cleansing sleep. ↗

— Mark Rice

#heavy-metal #mark-rice #metallic-dreams #punishment #sleep

For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them. ↗

— Thomas More

#manners #politics #punishment #scapegoats #thieves

A state that suppresses all freedom of speech, and which by imposing the most terrible punishments, treats each and every attempt at criticism, however morally justified, and every suggestion for improvement as plotting to high treason, is a state that breaks an unwritten law. ↗

— Kurt Huber

#breaks #criticism #each #every #freedom

If life is a punishment, one should wish for an end; if life is a test, one should wish it to be short. ↗

— Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

#life #paul-and-virginie #paul-et-virginie #pessimism #pessimistic

I stood behind the man’s chair, my blade at his throat. “Why do you do it?” I asked, knowing he wouldn’t answer. “Kill people, and blow up buildings, and sell drugs?” It was what they all did. Committed crimes. That was why I killed them. “You’re a criminal, a terrorist, a danger. And I have been asked to take you out.” I told him. I was legend now, yet he asked the same question all the others did. “What is your name?” My sensitive ears tuned out the slit as my sword cut his neck. I walked around the chair to see his face. I watched as his eyes–slowly at first–changed from blue to milky white. His skin went pale. And as I heard him take his last breath, I ducked in so my lips hovered at his ear, and whispered, “My name, is Sharden. ↗

— Alysha Speer

#body-of-blades #crime #kill #punishment #sharden

If you’re still waiting for it, it mean you’re not yet ready for it…whatever “it” is…so stop looking at waiting as a punishment and start looking at it as preparation! ↗

— Mandy Hale

#faith #keeping-the-faith #positive-thinking #preparation #punishment

[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

It's one thing to forbid the worship of a god, and another to command that it be forgotten. One day I found the oldest tree of all, a black oak bigger than twelve men could encircle with their arms, and I knew it for the one Na called Heart of The Wood. Dolls of twigs and shucks dangled from its branches: right side up to cure barreness, upside down to bring on a miscarriage. Mudwomen had dared to put them there, knowing that if the kingsmen had caught them in the woods out of turn, they might also hang from those branches. ↗

— Sarah Micklem

#capitial-punishment #corn-dollies #old-gods #religion #men