Quotes & Sayings About Corporal Punishment

Fear of corporal punishment obscures children's awareness of the compassion underlying the parent's demands. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

Gates got up, but not fast or jerkily, with the same slowness that had always characterized him. He wiped the sweat off his palms by running them lightly down his sides. As though he were going to shake hands with somebody.
He was. He was going to shake hands with death.
He wasn't particularly frightened. Not that he was particularly brave. It was just that he didn't have very much imagination. Rationalizing, he knew that he wasn't going to be alive anymore ten minutes from now. Yet he wasn't used to casting his imagination ten minutes ahead of him, he'd always kept it by him in the present. He couldn't visualize it. So he wasn't as unnerved by it as the average man would have been.
("3 Kills For 1") — Cornell Woolrich

There's no corporal punishment here, or any other form of punishment for that matter, and the children are encouraged to speak up for themselves. Unfortunately, they're not always particularly choosey about the things they say, and it can be rather alarming and embarrassing. — E.R. Braithwaite

He also administered the school's corporal punishment known as The Wacks - which I was told, involved being hit with a big gym shoe made heftier by a kitchen weight wedged in the toe. The gym shoes name was Charlie. It is surely one of the world's greatest sadnesess that billions of shoes go about their benevolent businesses in aid of mankind, day after day, protecting feet providing warmth and support, unselfishly getting ducked in puddles, smeared in dog shit and yet remained unnamed. Whereas this nasty cunt of a show got lavished with affection like a pet. — David Mitchell

Sister Ernestine said something very nasty about how maybe Miss Simon didn't realize how unpleasant detention at the Mission Academy could be. I assured Sister Ernestine that if she was threatening corporal punishment, I would tell my mother, who was a local news anchor-woman and would be over here with a TV camera so fast, nobody would have time to say so much as a single Hail Mary. Sister Ernestine was pretty quiet after that. — Meg Cabot

I think when we talk about corporal punishment, and we have to think about our own children, and we are rather reluctant, it seems to me, to have other people administering punishment to our own children, because we are reluctant, it puts a special obligation on us to maintain order and to send children out from our homes who accept the idea of discipline. So I would not be for corporal punishment in the school, but I would be for very strong discipline at home so we don't place an unfair burden on our teachers. — John F. Kennedy

how many ghosts I was going to encounter. That Serra guy had to have a bunch of Native Americans mad at him - particularly considering that corporal punishment thing - and I hadn't any doubt I was going to encounter all of them. And yet, when my mom and I walked through the school's wide front archway into the courtyard around which the Mission had been constructed, I didn't see a single person who looked as if he or she didn't belong there. There were a few tourists snapping pictures of the impressive fountain, a gardener working diligently at the base of a palm tree - even at my new school there were palm trees - a priest walking in silent contemplation down the airy breezeway. It was a beautiful, restful place - especially for a building that was so old and had to have seen so much death. I couldn't understand it. Where were all the ghosts? Maybe they were afraid to hang around the place. I was a little afraid, looking up at that crucifix. — Meg Cabot

Gilda: How severe is the corporal punishment here?
Mrs. McCracken: Honey, nobody's going to spank you here. Don't worry. — Jennifer Allison

The rules were just different back then, especially in regard to corporal punishment. Not only could you hit your own children, but you could also hit other people's. — David Sedaris

In the short term, corporal punishment may produce obedience. But it is a fact documented by research that in the long term the results are inability to learn, violence and rage, bullying, cruelty, inability to feel another's pain, especially that of one's own children, even drug addiction and suicide, unless there are enlightened or at least helping witnesses on hand to prevent that development. — Alice Miller

WILL ALIGNMENT
Despot's ultimate goal, using terror as his tool in trade = Corporal punishment in schools
Kamil Ali — Kamil Ali

Once you have mathematical certainty there is nothing left to do or to understand. There will be nothing left but to bottle up your five senses and plunge into contemplation. While if you stick to consciousness, even though the same result is attained, you can at least flog yourself at times, and that will, at any rate, liven you up. Reactionary as it is, corporal punishment is better than nothing. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

When a man beats his boy, he wants a son who won't buck him. He's trying to make a coward. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, it works.
And the hundredth boy?
We can go either way. Kill the old man, or try to become a better one. — Mary Doria Russell

I have lived to see the greatest plague on earth
the condemning of God's word, a fearful thing, surpassing all other plagues in the world; for thereupon most surely follow all manner of punishments, eternal and corporal. — Martin Luther

I doubt whether classical education ever has been or can be successfully carried out without corporal punishment. — George Orwell

Rusche and Kirchheimer relate the different systems of punishment with the systems of production within which they operate: thus, in a slave economy, punitive mechanisms serve to provide an additional labour force
and to constitute a body of 'civil' slaves in addition to those provided by war or trading; with feudalism, at a time when money and production were still at an early stage of development, we find a sudden increase in corporal punishments
the body being in most cases the only property accessible; the penitentiary (the Hopital General, the Spinhuis or the Rasphuis), forced labour and the prison factory appear with the development of the mercantile economy. But the industrial system requires a free market in labour and, in the nineteenth century, the role of forced labour in the mechanisms of punishment diminishes accordingly and 'corrective' detention takes its place. — Michel Foucault

Let us leave the EEC, abolish human rights laws, take TV sets, pool tables and phones out of prisons, bring back corporal and capital punishment, slash benefits and put single mothers into hostels instead of giving them council flats. Finally, if we chucked out all the illegal immigrants and asylum seekers there would be enough jobs for everyone. — Ken Bates

But that is who we are, that is where we come from. We are the offspring of metropolitan annihilation and destruction, of the war of all against all, of the conflict of each individual with every other individual, of a system governed by fear, of the compulsion to produce, of the profit of one to the detriment of others, of the division of people into men and women, young and old, sick and healthy, foreigners and Germans, and of the struggle for prestige. Where do we come from? From isolation in individual row-houses, from the suburban concrete cities, from prison cells, from the asylums and special units, from media brainwashing, from consumerism, from corporal punishment, from the ideology of nonviolence, from depression, from illness, from degradation, from humiliation, from the debasement of human beings, from all the people exploited by imperialism. — Ulrike Marie Meinhof

It will be seen that, as used, the word 'Fascism' is almost entirely meaningless. In conversation, of course, it is used even more wildly than in print. I have heard it applied to farmers, shopkeepers, Social Credit, corporal punishment, fox-hunting, bull-fighting, the 1922 Committee, the 1941 Committee, Kipling, Gandhi, Chiang Kai-Shek, homosexuality, Priestley's broadcasts, Youth Hostels, astrology, women, dogs and I do not know what else. — George Orwell

If only corporal punishment cured low self-esteem. — Jeph Jacques

I'm sure your wondering why I've brought you here."
I moved to the center of the room, my strappy sandals clacking on the marble floor. "I'm assuming this is where the punishment part comes in," I said. "So do I need to clean all these mirrors, or do I have to,like, stare at myself until I feel shamed or something?"
Surprisingly, Dad gave a tiny smile. "No,nothing quite that abstract. I want you to break one of the mirrors."
"Excuse me?"
Dad leaned back against the now-drapeless window and folded his arms over his chest. "Break a mirror, Sophie."
"What what, my head? Because I'm pretty sure that'd be corporal punishment, and Mom would not be cool with that."
"With your powers."
Ugh.I took in the dozens of mirros and muttered, "I think I'd rather use my head. — Rachel Hawkins

Our teachers were firm believers in the corporal punishment that Americans had given up, which was probably one reason they could no longer win wars. For us, violence began at home and continued in school, parents and teachers beating children and students like Persian rugs to shake the dust of complacency and stupidity out of them, and in that way make them more beautiful. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

To see justice done, men were prepared to take the law into their own hands. In the Carolinas, bands of vigilantes or Regulators crisscrossed the territory in the late 1760s, stamping out local hooligans and waging war on interlopers. This vigilante attitude was epitomized by a Scots Borders descendant from Pittsylvania County, Virginia, named Captain William Lynch. He ruled as virtual dictator of his county, punishing wrongdoers and warning lawless elements that "we will inflict such corporal punishment on him or them, as to us shall seem adequate to the crime committed or the damage sustained." "Lynch's Law," and the punishments and hangings it inflicted, also became part of American culture - an ugly part, but a legacy of a harsh world and a harsh, unforgiving people. — Arthur Herman

This was a cruelty made by history. Long after serfdom had been abolished the land captains exercised their right to flog the peasants for petty crimes. Liberals rightly warned about the psychological effects of this brutality. One physician, addressing the Kazan Medical Society in 1895 said that it 'not only debases but even hardens and brutalizes human nature'. Chekhov, who was also a practising physician, denounced corporal punishment, adding that 'it coarsens and brutalizes not only the offenders but also those who execute the punishments and those who are present at it'. — Orlando Figes

I learned discipline from my father. Not in terms of corporal punishment, but being determined in whatever you do, and sticking with it. — Ryan Reynolds

I accepted what the Sisters taught in religion class: that God is loving, merciful, charitable, forgiving. That message didn't jibe with adults smacking kids. — Sonia Sotomayor

Corporal punishment is as humiliating for him who gives it as for him who receives it; it is ineffective besides. Neither shame nor physical pain have any other effect than a hardening one. — Ellen Key

as "a general endorsement of the exploitative colonization tactics of the Spanish. Though Junipero Serra was known to have argued on behalf of the property rights and economic entitlement of converted Native Americans, he consistently advocated against their right to self-governance, and was a staunch supporter of corporal punishment, appealing to the Spanish government for the right to flog Indians." When Doc had finished this particular lecture, I just looked at him and went, "Photographic memory much?" He looked embarrassed. "Well," he said. "It's good to know the history of the place where you're living." I filed this away for future reference. Doc might be just the person I needed if Jesse showed up again. Now, standing in the cool office of the ancient building Junipero Serra had constructed for the betterment of the natives in the area, I wondered — Meg Cabot

How long y' think it'll take t'git that wild streak out im?"
"Well, Brother Tiggins, that'll depend on how long he can weather the leather. — Mars Hill

Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers. — P. J. O'Rourke

Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Any form of corporal punishment or 'spanking' is a violent attack upon another human being's integrity. The effect remains with the victim forever and becomes an unforgiving part of his or hier personality
a massive frustration resulting in a hostility which will seek expression in later life in violent acts towards others. The sooner we understand that love and gentleness are the only kinds of called-far behavior towards children, the better. The child, especially, learns to become the kind of human being that he or she has experienced. This should be fully understood by all caregivers. — Ashley Montagu

We could say that people who eat grits, listen to country music, follow stock-car racing, support corporal punishment in the schools, hunt 'possum, go to Baptist churches and prefer bourbon to Scotch are likely to be Southerners. — John Shelton Reed

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

Not long ago I was much amused by imagining - what if the fancy suddenly took me to kill some one, a dozen people at once, or to do some thing awful, something considered the most awful crime in the world - what a predicament my judges would be in, with my having only a fortnight to live, now that corporal punishment and torture is abolished. I should die comfortably in hospital, warm aad snug, with an attentive doctor, and very likely much more snug and comfortable than at home. I wonder that the idea doesn't strike people in my position, if only as a joke. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Let us now turn to the question of the effects of physical punishment on children. This research should also not give solace to advocates of the Strict Father model. The major research indicates that having strict parents who perform painful corporal punishment in childhood leads to domestic violence, aggression, and delinquency in later life. Take — George Lakoff