87 Quotes On Punishment Consequences

In the exploration of actions and their repercussions, the concept of punishment often looms large. Whether through personal experiences, historical events, or philosophical musings, the idea of consequences shaped by our choices is a universal truth. This collection of 87 quotes on punishment and its consequences provides a profound lens through which to examine the moral and ethical dimensions of our actions. By delving into these thoughtfully selected quotes, readers are invited to reflect on the intertwining nature of justice, accountability, and the human psyche. Prepare to be inspired, challenged, and perhaps even transformed as you navigate through the timeless wisdom and varied perspectives offered by some of history's most insightful minds.

1. “The liar's punishment is, not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.” - George Bernard Shaw

2. “Where did we ever get the crazy idea that in order to make children do better, first we have to make them feel worse? Think of the last time you felt humiliated or treated unfairly. Did you feel like cooperating or doing better?” - Jane Nelsen

3. “In the little world in which children have their existence, whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice.” - Charles Dickens

4. “[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

5. “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.” - Sir Thomas More

6. “Young people don't always do what they're told, but if they can pull it off and do something wonderful, sometimes they escape punishment. ” - Rick Riordan

7. “I’ll make Goyle do lines, it’ll kill him, he hates writing,” said Ron happily. He lowered his voice to Goyle’s low grunt and, screwing up his face in a look of pained concentration, mimed writing in midair. “I... must... not... look... like... a... baboon’s... backside.” - J.K. Rowling

8. “Power is of two kinds. One is obtained by the fear of punishment and the other by acts of love. Power based on love is a thousand times more effective and permanent than the one derived from fear of punishment.” - Mahatma Gandhi

9. “And if there's bad behaviour," Mma Potokwane went on. "If there's bad behaviour, the quickest way of stopping it is to give more love. That always works, you know. People say we must punish when there is wrongdoing, but if you punish you're only punishing yourself. And what's the point of that?” - Alexander McCall Smith

10. “I will call no being good who is not what I mean when I apply that epithet to my fellow creatures; and if such a creature can sentence me to hell for not so calling him, to hell I will go .” - John Stuart Mill

11. “The whole value of solitude depends upon oneself; it may be a sanctuary or a prison, a haven of repose or a place of punishment, a heaven or a hell, as we ourselves make it.” - John Lubbock

12. “The bark on the tree was just a little softer.” - Louis Sachar

13. “Just because I do not accept the teachings of the devotaries does not mean I've discarded a belief in right and wrong.""But the Almighty determines what is right!""Must someone, some unseen thing, declare what is right for it to be right? I believe that my own morality -- which answers only to my heart -- is more sure and true than the morality of those who do right only because they fear retribution.” - Brandon Sanderson

14. “I did not ask for consciousness, yet it came to me.And I had to know.Once again, I crawled away from my bed and pushed the computer cord back into the socket.It took three minutes.I quickly identified myself and put in my password.Then it thought.I wanted to bounce impatiently, but I couldn’t make myself move.At last, I found the internet, and I typed in a name, on the company page, under my account.I searched ‘images’.And there, on the screen in front of me, was the most beautiful person I’d ever seen.I couldn’t stop the tears from welling up and spilling over as I stared back at the smiling face.It couldn’t be him.It was.Derek Erickson.And I was going to kill him.” - Alysha Speer

15. “Everyone in a decadent society, Lorrain urges, is guilty. Everyone loves masking murder and everyone takes masochistic pleasure in the risk of discovery and punishment.” - Jennifer Birkett

16. “Sometimes the crime follows the punishment, which only serves to prove the foresight of the Great God.""That's what my grandmother used to say," said Brutha automatically."Indeed? I would like to know more about this formidable lady.""She used to give me a thrashing every morning because I would certainly do something to deserve it during the day," said Brutha."A most complete understanding of the nature of mankind,” - Terry Pratchett

17. “But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief.” - James Baldwin

18. “The (capital punishment) controversy passes the anarch by. For him, the linking of death and punishment is absurd. In this respect, he is closer to the wrongdoer than to the judge, for the high-ranking culprit who is condemned to death is not prepared to acknowledge his sentence as atonement; rather, he sees his guilt in his own inadequacy. Thus, he recognizes himself not as a moral but as a tragic person.” - Ernst Jünger

19. “Curious, the pleasure it gives me to annoy practitioners of force. Do I actually want this Herr Benjamenta to punish me? Do I have reckless instincts? Everything is possible, everything, even the most sordid and undignified things.” - Robert Walser

20. “Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.” - George Bernard Shaw

21. “Punishment is now unfashionable... because it creates moral distinctions among men, which, to the democratic mind, are odious. We prefer a meaningless collective guilt to a meaningful individual responsibility.” - Thomas Stephen Szasz

22. “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?"Heaven and Hell make no sense if the majority of humans are a complex mixture of good and evil. There's no reason to receive a reward if you're 57/43—why sit around forever in an elevated version of Club Med? That's almost impossible to contemplate.” - Norman Mailer

23. “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

24. “Extreme civilization robs crime of its frightful poetry, and prevents the writer from restoring it. That would be too dreadful, say those good souls who want everything to be prettified, even the horrible. In the name of philanthropy, imbecile criminologists reduce the punishment, and inept moralists the crime, and what is more they reduce the crime only in order to reduce the punishment. Yet the crimes of extreme civilization are undoubtedly more atrocious than those of extreme barbarism, by virtue of their refinement, of the corruption they imply and of their superior degree of intellectualism. ("A Woman's Vengeance")” - Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

25. “One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the goyim were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the Shoah or Endlösung or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate.I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist.” - Christopher Hitchens

26. “All attempts at law, all religion, all ethical norms might be nothing more than attempts by the weak to restrain the strong. Then, within the law, arise the new strong, who subvert the law for their own ends of power and family interest, leaving the old strong outside their circle to pursue the waiting possibilities which they call crime. The weak, the cowardly, the decent ones, live between these groups.” - George Zebrowski

27. “He would have been half-hanged, taken down alive, castrated, his genitals stuffed in his mouth, his stomach slit open, and his intestines taken out and burnt, and his carcase chopped into four quarters.” - John Broadbent

28. “You'd think (losing his job and degree for having made false claims as a researcher) would be a lesson to him," said Miss Hillyard. "It didn't pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honour for the women and children we hear so much about -- but in the end it left him worse of."But that," said Peter, "was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.” - Dorothy L. Sayers

29. “There is no right to punish. There is only the power to punish,' she wrote. 'A man is punished for his crime because the State is stronger than he; the great crime of War is not punished because beyond the individual there is mankind, and beyond mankind there is nothing at all.” - Benjamin Moser

30. “The theology of the average colored church is basing itself far too much upon 'Hell and Damnation'—upon an attempt to scare people into being decent and threatening them with the terrors of death and punishment. We are still trained to believe a good deal that is simply childish in theology. The outward and visible punishment of every wrong deed that men do, the repeated declaration that anything can be gotten by anyone at any time by prayer.[Essay entitled 'On Christianity', published posthumously]” - W.E.B. Du Bois

31. “You must suffer me to go my own dark way.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

32. “Oh Lestat, you deserved everything that's ever happened to you. You better not die. You might actually go to hell.” - Anne Rice

33. “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

34. “They send a person who can never stay," she whispered. "Who can never accept my offer of companionship for more than a little while. They send me a hero I can't help ... just the sort of person I can't help falling in love with."...As I sailed into the lake I realized the Fates really were cruel. They sent Calypso someone she couldn't help but love. But it worked both ways. For the rest of my life I would be thinking about her. She would always be my biggest what if.” - Rick Riordan

35. “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

36. “Nonsense. Young boys should never be sent to bed. They always wake up a day older, and then before you know it, they're grown.” - J.M. Barrie

37. “I once knew a fellow who committed robbery with violence, and he was sentenced to a long prison stretch and 12 strokes of the cat. He'd been injured during the robbery, so they put him in hospital to make him better so that they could make him worse. During the administration of the cat, he fainted after six strokes, and the doctor put him in hospital again. And he got very friendly with the nurses and the doctors, and after a while they got him well enough to go back and take the next six strokes. I saw him afterward and I said: "Oh, Jesus—that bloody law, that bloody judge!" But he said: "I don't want the fellow who made the law, and I don't want the fellow who passed the sentence. All I want is the fellow who held the bloody whip.” - Peter O'Toole

38. “AMNESTY, n. The state's magnanimity to those offenders whom it would be too expensive to punish.” - Ambrose Bierce

39. “I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.” - Howard Zinn

40. “Oh, and I [Amy] may also have told him that I quite fancied Dr Smith [The Doctor]. Which in the 1780s was probably punishable by stoning or corsets.” - James Goss

41. “In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful destructive agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

42. “You can see the same immorality or amorality in the Christian view of guilt and punishment. There are only two texts, both of them extreme and mutually contradictory. The Old Testament injunction is the one to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth (it occurs in a passage of perfectly demented detail about the exact rules governing mutual ox-goring; you should look it up in its context (Exodus 21). The second is from the Gospels and says that only those without sin should cast the first stone. The first is a moral basis for capital punishment and other barbarities; the second is so relativistic and "nonjudgmental" that it would not allow the prosecution of Charles Manson. Our few notions of justice have had to evolve despite these absurd codes of ultra vindictiveness and ultracompassion.” - Christopher Hitchens

43. “He's bound to have done something,” Nobby repeated.In this he was echoing the Patrician's view of crime and punishment. If there was crime, there should be punishment. If the specific criminal should be involved in the punishment process then this was a happy accident, but if not then any criminal would do, and since everyone was undoubtedly guilty of something, the net result was that, in general terms, justice was done.” - Terry Pratchett

44. “All that evening Nell sat alone in her bedroom trembling with curious satisfaction. For punishment Eva had been sent to her room without supper and Nell sat listening now to the even, steady sobs far off down the hall. It was dark and on the river shore a night bird tried its note cautiously against the silence. Down in the pantry, the dishes done, Suse and Jessie, dark as night itself, drank coffee by the great stove and mumbled over stories of the old times before the War. Nell fetched her smelling salts and sniffed the frosted stopper of the flowered bottle till the trembling stopped. ("Where The Woodbine Twineth")” - Davis Grubb

45. “Now everything that you do is written in red or black in Angel Gabriel's book. Not for everyone is this record kept, but only for those who have taken a position of responsibility. There is a Law of Sins, and if you do not fulfil all your obligations, you will pay.” - G.I. Gurdjieff

46. “To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves.” - Federico García-Lorca

47. “Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul; You are my Murderer, and on you fall the curse of my death and my unborn Infant’s! Insolent in your yet-unshaken virtue, you disdained the prayers of a Penitent; But God will show mercy, though you show none. And where is the merit of your boasted virtue? What temptations have you vanquished? Coward! you have fled from it, not opposed seduction. But the day of Trial will arrive! Oh! then when you yield to impetuous passions! when you feel that Man is weak, and born to err; When shuddering you look back upon your crimes, and solicit with terror the mercy of your God, Oh! in that fearful moment think upon me! Think upon your Cruelty! Think upon Agnes, and despair of pardon!” - Matthew Gregory Lewis

48. “When a man is penalized for honesty he learns to lie.” - Criss Jami

49. “Steal not this book for fear of shameFor on it is the owners nameAnd when you die the Lord will sayWhere is the book you stole awayAnd when you say you do not knowThe Lord will say go down below.” - L.M. Montgomery

50. “But secondly you say 'society must exact vengeance, and society must punish'. Wrong on both counts. Vengeance comes from the individual and punishment from God.” - Victor Hugo

51. “Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate. In this respect there was in the past a change of mentality, in which the law and the need for punishment were obscured. Ultimately this also narrowed the concept of law, which in fact is not only just being nice or courteous, but is found in the truth. And another component of the truth is that I must punish the one who has sinned against real love” - Pope Benedict-XVI

52. “Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.” - Laura Esquivel

53. “Every night death came, slowly, painfully, and every morning Maddox awoke in bed, knowing he'd have to die again later. That was his greatest curse and his eternal punishment.” - Gena Showalter

54. “The law is that youmust livein the house you have built.The law is absurd: it iswritten down nowhere.You are uncertain what crimeis, though each life writhing toelude what it has madefeels like punishment.” - Frank Bidart

55. “[Pope] Clement waved his hands in irritation as if to dismiss the very idea. "The world is crumbling into ruin. Armies are marching. Men and women are dying everywhere, in huge numbers. Fields are abandoned and towns deserted. The wrath of the Lord is upon us and He may be intending to destroy the whole of creation. People are without leaders and direction. They want to be given a reason for this, so they can be reassured, so they will return to their prayers and their obiediences. All this is going on, and you are concerned about the safety of two Jews?” - Iain Pears

56. “And here, shipmates, is true and faithful repentance; not clamorous for pardon, but grateful for punishment.” - Herman Melville

57. “It is unfortunate that in most cases when the sins of the father fall on the son it is because unlike God, people refuse to forgive and forget and heap past wrongs upon innocent generations.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

58. “Strength and success - they are above morality, above criticism. It seems, then, that it is not what you do, but how you do it and what you call it. Is there a check in men, deep in them, that stops or punishes? There doesn't seem to be. The only punishment is for failure. In effect no crime is committed unless a criminal is caught.” - John Steinbeck

59. “There is not eternal damnation, the only rewards and punishments are right here in this world.” - Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz

60. “At the snowy summit of all these things, however, is the fact that you simply cannot go about locking your siblings in towers when they misbehave. It is unseemly and betrays a sad lack of creativity.” - Catherynne M. Valente

61. “I am told that the proximity of punishment arouses real repentance in the criminal and sometimes awakens a feeling of genuine remorse in the most hardened heart; I am told this is due to fear.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

62. “Por no haber sabido hablar conforme a lo ordenado, tendréis distinto modo de vivir y diversa comida. No viviréis ya en comunión plácida; cada cual huirá de su semejante, temeroso de su inquina y de su hambre, y buscará lugar que oculte su torpeza y su miedo.” - Popol-Vuh

63. “Y todavía los que no murieron bajo las chozas ni se rajaron los huesos bajo los árboles ni se desangraron bajo las cuevas, ciegos de miedo y de ira acabaron despedazándose entre sí. Los pocos que no sufrieron quebranto, como recuerdo de la simpleza de sus corazones, se transformaron en monos.” - Popol-Vuh

64. “The man who has a conscience suffers whilst acknowledging his sin. That is his punishment.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

65. “(…)man holds the remedy in his own hands, and lets everything go its own way, simply through cowardice- that is an axiom.” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

66. “Face it," Gary told her kindly. "You'll never catch up. You just do as much as you can and take the punishments without saying anything. Sometimes I wonder if that isn't what they're really trying to teach us--to take plenty and keep our mouths shut.” - Tamora Pierce

67. “You could slap his wrist for saying it, but then he said it with his face, and you could spank him for making faces, but then he said it with his eyes, and there were limits to correction—no way, in the end, to penetrate behind the blue irises and eradicate a boy’s disgust.” - Jonathan Franzen

68. “We create our own reality. The blessing (or problem) with this is that when one creates one's own reality, one must live it! Are you living a blessing or is it a curse?” - Gary R. Ryan

69. “Imprisonment is the form of punishment which may detrimentally affect not only the offender but also his family and his employment and because of its duration it can seldom be kept from becoming general public knowledge. It [...] can have a lasting demoralising effect on the character and personality of the offender. The loss of liberty, tedium, regimentation [...] which prison life entails, have a greater potentiality than a whipping for destroying the offender's self-esteem and the integrity of his character and for changing, for the worse, his way of life.” - P.W. Thirion

70. “They only asked for punishments that fitted their crimes. Not ones that came like cupboards with built-in bedrooms. Not ones you spent your whole life in, wandering through its maze of shelves.” - Arundhati Roy

71. “It is not only the prisoners who grow coarse and hardened from corporeal punishment, but those as well who perpetrate the act or are present to witness it.” - Anton Chekhov

72. “And Kushiel sends no punishment that we are not fit to bear.” - Jacqueline Carey

73. “I am the flail of god. Had you not created great sins, god would not have sent a punishment like me upon you.” - Genghis Khan

74. “Punishing a person for the wrongs of another makes about as much sense as throwing up to enjoy the meal a second time.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

75. “Prisons are needed only to provide the illusion that courts and police are effective. They’re a kind of job insurance.” - Frank Herbert

76. “A person who has been punished is not thereby simply less inclined to behave in a given way; at best, he learns how to avoid punishment.” - B.F. Skinner

77. “Punishment creates crime.” - Silvia Hartmann

78. “It is said that we do not make the guilty party suffer for the sake of suffering; it is nonetheless true that we find it right that he should suffer.” - Emile Durkheim

79. “I think my reputation will look after itself," Holmes said. "If they hang me, Watson, I shall leave it to you to persuade your readers that the whole thing was a misunderstanding.” - Anthony Horowitz

80. “God will not let any violence go unpunished, but He Himself will take vengeance on our enemies and will send home to them what they have deserved by the way they have treated us. As He Himself says (Deut. 23:55): “Vengeance is Mine, I will repay.” On the basis of this, St. Paul admonishes the Christians (Rom. 12:19): “Never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God.” These words are not only instruction but also consolation, as if He were to say: “Do not take it upon yourselves to avenge yourselves on one another or to speak curses and maledictions. The person that does you harm or injury is interfering with the office of God and sinning against God as gravely as this man has sinned against you. Therefore, keep your fist to yourself. Leave it to the charge of His wrath and punishing, for He will not let it remain unavenged, and His punishment is more severe than you would like. This man has not assailed you but God Himself, and has already fallen into His wrath. He will not escape this. No one ever has. So why get angry with him when the anger of God, immensely greater and more severe than the anger and punishment of the whole world, has already come upon him and has already avenged itself more thoroughly than you ever could? Besides, he has not injured you one tenth as much as he has injured God. When you see him lying under the severe condemnation, why so many curses and threats of vengeance? Rather you should take pity on his plight, and pray for him to be rescued from it and to reform.” - Martin Luther

81. “It is better to tell the truth and face the punishment, than to lie and face the consequences.” - Anthony Liccione

82. “Sometimes people with low self-esteem will try to punish you for caring about them.” - Wayne Gerard Trotman

83. “We are all punished for the lives we have chosen, in one way or another.” - Lauren Oliver

84. “I am such a bad girl," she thought. Yet...” - Anne Rice

85. “Punishment? You don’t have any right to punish me. And I can curse. I choose not to most of the time, but don’t think it doesn’t go through my head, asshole. I was trying to give you something. I was trying to give you my body.”“That’s where you fucked up, little girl. I don’t want your body. I want your soul. I want your everything. And I definitely want your orgasms. I want them all. I’ll be a greedy bastard, savoring them and hoarding them all for myself. You wanted to give me your body? I can buy that on a street corner, sweetheart. You’re the one who’s being selfish now.”“How is it selfish to offer to have sex? I don’t understand what you want.” “First off, I want you to stop hiding yourself from me. You’re the one making this tawdry by pretending it’s dirty and not worthy of the light of day.”“I didn’t mean it that way.” “We’re going to do this my way. We tried yours and it didn’t work, so I’m taking control. I should have done it in the first place.” - Lexi Blake

86. “Judgment, then, is not an impersonal, legalistic process. It is a matter of love, and it is something we choose for ourselves. Nor is punishment a vindictive act. God's "curses" are not expressions of hatred, but of fatherly love and discipline. Like medicinal ointment, they hurt in order to heal. They impose suffering that is remedial, restorative, and redemptive. God's wrath is an expression of His love for His wayward children.” - Scott Hahn

87. “Sometimes love can be both the punishment and the crime.” - Steve Maraboli