Quotes & Sayings About Collective Punishment

Policies are organizational scar tissue. They are codified overreactions to situations that are unlikely to happen again. They are collective punishment for the misdeeds of an individual. This is how bureaucracies are born. No one sets out to create a bureaucracy. They sneak up on companies slowly. They are created one policy - one scar - at a time. So don't scar on the first cut. Don't create a policy because one person did something wrong once. Policies are only meant for situations that come up over and over again. — Jason Fried

The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective. — Moshe Dayan

Zero-tolerance on drinking and driving - meaning no drinking at all before driving - is a collective punishment that, in essence, only affects responsible adults who follow the law. — David Harsanyi

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 Szasz

To accept life in an Israeli open prison and enjoy limited autonomy and the right to work as underpaid laborers in Israel, bereft of any workers' rights, or 2) resist, even mildly, and risk living in a maximum-security prison, subjected to instruments of collective punishment, including house demolitions, arrests without trial, expulsions, and in severe cases, assassinations and murder. — Noam Chomsky

What people still do not like to admit is that there were two crimes in the form of one. Just as the destruction of Jewry was the necessary condition for the rise and expansion of Nazism, so the ethnic cleansing of Germans was a precondition for the Stalinization of Poland. I first noticed this point when reading an essay by the late Ernest Gellner, who at the end of the war had warned Eastern Europeans that collective punishment of Germans would put them under Stalin's tutelage indefinitely. They would always feel the guilty need for an ally against potential German revenge. — Christopher Hitchens

He's feeling a pull, like gravity, of the approaching TV news. It's a condition of the times, this compulsion to hear how it stands with the world, and be joined to the generality, to a community of anxiety. The habit's grown stronger these past two years; a different scale of news value has been set by monstrous and spectacular scenes. [ ... ] Everyone fears it, but there's also a darker longing in the collective mind, a sickening for self-punishment and a blasphemous curiosity. Just as the hospitals have their crisis plans, so the television networks stand ready to deliver, and their audiences wait. Bigger, grosser next time. Please don't let it happen. But let me see it all the same, as it's happening and from every angle, and let me be among the first to know. — Ian McEwan

Wilson had been killed by everybody. It was this that made his death special, the children had been told. It was justice, it was all the people showing how much they hated this crime. Killing was justice when everybody joined in. — Barry Unsworth

It is possible to tolerate anything as long as it only affects you. But the method of collective punishment is bigger than that. — Nadezhda Tolokonnikova

We now have a theory of effective collective action with decentralized authority. The theory is based on a conception of human nature as at once social, interdependent, justice-seeking, self-interested, and strategic. That conception is consistent with contemporary social science and with ancient Greek thought. The theory explains (through a mix of ideology, federalism, "altruistic" punishment, and existential threats) individual motivation to cooperate in the absence of a unitary sovereign as third-party enforcer. It provides (through information exchange) a mechanism that enables many individuals to accomplish common goals and to produce public goods without requiring orders from a master. — Josiah Ober

It is of inestimable importance that the classical and biblical traditions linked slavery with original sin, punishment < ... >, the later abolition of slavery became tied with personal and collective freedom, with the redemption from sin, with the romanticizing of many form of labor, and with the ultimate salvation of humankind. — David Brion Davis

I still don't understand why we have to be punished for Alex's ills," Will said. Alex looked her eldest brother square in the eye, saying tartly, "I assure you it's my punishment as well, Will. There is little I want to do less than be trapped in the country with you lot." "Exactly why I'm guessing Mother is forcing all of us to attend," Nick pointed out. "Why not just suffer through the ball?" Alex smiled sweetly. "Why, to make your collective lives more difficult, of course!" Three sets of male eyes narrowed as Ella went into a coughing fit and Vivi smiled into her teacup. The — Sarah MacLean