When the gods wish to punish us, they answer our prayers.
—Oscar Wilde
I am against using death as a punishment. I am also against using it as a reward.
—Stanislaw J. Lec
No good deed goes unpunished.
—Clare Booth Luce
In nature there are neither rewards nor punishments—there are consequences.
—R. D. Ingersoll
Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter.
—Jessamyn West
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
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
Poverty is like punishment for a crime you didn't commit.
—Eli Khamarov
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.
—Oscar Wilde
Punishment is directed primarily at the potentially guilty.
—Michel Foucault
What they don't know is, no matter how they decide, they can't penalize me more than I'm already punishing myself.
—Ann Aguirre in Aftermath
I think capital punishment works great. Every killer you kill never kills again.
—Bill Maher
Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen
—Robert Ingersoll
If only corporal punishment cured low self-esteem.
—Jeph Jacques