Punishment is directed primarily at the potentially guilty.

—Michel Foucault

justice morality crime punishment

About Michel Foucault

Portrait of Michel Foucault

Paul-Michel Foucault, known as Michel Foucault, (UK: FOO-koh, US: foo-KOH; French: [pɔl miʃɛl fuko]; 15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, literary critic, and historian of ideas who analyzed the relationships between power, knowledge, and liberty, and how they are used as a form of social...

More quotations tagged with “punishment”

As one reads history . . . one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.

history crime cruelty punishment community

Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.

—Eli Khamarov

poverty crime punishment

To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no one in his right mind will believe this.

—Albert Camus

society evil good punishment isolation

Every crime is born of necessity. If you want less crime, you must change the conditions. Poverty makes crime. Want, rags, crusts, failure, misfortune — all these awake the wild beast in man, and finally he takes, and takes contrary to law, and becomes a criminal. And what do you do with him? You punish him. Why not punish a man for having consumption? The time will come when you will see that that is just as logical.

—Robert Ingersoll

justice poverty crime logic punishment

Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.

—Jessamyn West

writing escape art punishment

History

18 Jul 2015 Added