Quotes & Sayings About Crime Punishment

The cab rattled, jingled, jolted; in fact, the last was quite extraordinary. By its disproportionate violence and magnitude it obliterated every sensation of onward movement; and the effect was of being shaken in a stationary apparatus like a mediaeval device for the punishment of crime, or some very newfangled invention for the cure of a sluggish liver. It was extremely distressing; and the raising of Mrs Verloc's mother's voice sounded like a wail of pain. — Joseph Conrad

The chief problem in any community cursed with crime is not the punishment of the criminals, but the preventing of the young from being trained to crime. — W.E.B. Du Bois

It is amazing to a great many of us how Congress ignores the Constitution. For example, the 13th Amendment clearly states: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction." Currently, the average working person pays over forty percent of his earnings to the Government (City, State and National) and IT IS NOT VOLUNTARY! Did the people vote for these taxes? NO! They were imposed by a Communist dominated Congress. Therefore, Congress has declared that each and every wage earner is a SLAVE of the Government and the Government has a right to steal their money. WHY? — Robert Gates Sr.

Even Mademoiselle Neubahr can't make me believe in hell. It doesn't seem a very - witty - solution of the crime-and-punishment situation, does it? — Frances Noyes Hart

No game in the world is as tidy and dramatically neat as baseball, with cause and effect, crime and punishment, motive and result, so cleanly defined. — Paul Gallico

I write that crime is an unlawful act of violence that can be committed by anyone, and that punishment is the consequence designed for criminals who don't have the economic means to cover it up. Throughout history, men of wealth and power have been exempt from facing the consequences of their evil deeds. Crime, therefore, can be defined as an offense committed by an individual of inferior status in society. Punishment is a consequence forced on the perpetrator of the crime only if he occupies one of the lower steps of the social ladder — Mahbod Seraji

Punishment is but legalized crime. In a society built on prevention, rather than retaliation, there would be very little crime. The few exceptions will be treated medically, as of unsound mind and body. — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

Your fate is to be yourself, both punishment and crime. — Jane Hirshfield

But the well-intended idea had gone very bad. Filling a place with people who had no hope and knew they were about to descend into a rotten, horrific spiral of insanity ended up creating some of the most wretched anarchic zones ever known to man. With the residents well aware that there could be no real punishment or consequences worse than what they already faced, crime rates grew astronomically. And so the developments became havens of debauchery. — James Dashner

They look upon fraud as a greater crime than theft, and therefore seldom fail to punish it with death; for they allege, that care and vigilance, with a very common understanding, may preserve a man's goods from thieves, but honesty has no defence against superior cunning; and, since it is necessary that there should be a perpetual intercourse of buying and selling, and dealing upon credit, where fraud is permitted and connived at, or has no law to punish it, the honest dealer is always undone, and the knave gets the advantage. — Jonathan Swift

If I had admitted my guilt, it would have been the same as putting my head on the chopping block - lifetime ban. Death penalty. I spent my entire life on the baseball fields of America, and I was not going to give up my profession without first seeing some hard evidence ... right or wrong, the punishment didn't fit the crime, so I denied the crime. — Pete Rose

For a punishment to be just it should consist of only such gradations of intensity as suffice to deter men from committing crimes. — Cesare Beccaria

The work of eradicating crimes is not by making punishment familiar, but formidable. — Oliver Goldsmith

It's great that I can look up a fact instantly on my cellphone, but I miss the days in my room with a dog-eared, text-heavy paperback, immersed in the statistics of crime and punishment and lunacy, completely alone with the narrative of human depravity. — Russell Smith

As far as the Jews were concerned, the transformation of the "crime" of Judaism into the fashionable "vice" of Jewishness was dangerous in the extreme. Jews had been able to escape from Judaism into conversion; from Jewishness there was no escape. A crime, moreover, is met with punishment; a vice can only be exterminated. — Hannah Arendt

I was not much afraid of punishment, I was only afraid of disgrace.But that I feared more than death, more than crime, more than anything in the world. I should have rejoiced if the earth had swallowed me up and stifled me in the abyss. But my invincible sense of shame prevailed over everything . It was my shame that made me impudent, and the more wickedly I behaved the bolder my fear of confession made me. I saw nothing but the horror of being found out, of being publicly proclaimed, to my face, as a thief, as a liar, and slanderer. — Jean-Jacques Rousseau

The method of electrocution would be much better than the old method of hanging. — Meldrim Thomson Jr.

The population becomes the internal enemy. Any sign of life, of protest, or even mere doubt, is a dangerous challenge from the standpoint of military doctrine and national security. So complicated mechanisms of prevention adn punishment have been developed ... To operate effectively, the repression must appear arbitrary. Apart from breathing, any human activity can constitute a crime ... State terrorism aims to paralyze the population with fear. — Eduardo Galeano

Whenever a human being, through the commission of a crime, has become exiled from good, he needs to be reintegrated with it through suffering. The suffering should be inflicted with the aim of bringing the soul to recognize freely some day that its infliction was just. — Simone Weil

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting. — Ovid

I worked out an anarchistic theory that all government is evil, that the punishment always does more harm than the crime and the people can be trusted to behave decently if you will only let them alone. — George Orwell

Man is a creature who gets used to everything, and that, I think, is the best definition of him. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

One of the things that Dostoevsky talks about is that no character is too high to fall and no character is too low to be redeemed. 'Crime and Punishment' began with a person going out and consciously becoming a cold-blooded murderer, and it took 800 pages and an epilogue before the person finally asked for forgiveness. — Jeffrey Bell

Sec. 10. Besides the crime which consists in violating the law, and varying from the right rule of reason, whereby a man so far becomes degenerate, and declares himself to quit the principles of human nature, and to be a noxious creature, there is commonly injury done to some person or other, and some other man receives damage by his transgression: in which case he who hath received any damage, has, besides the right of punishment common to him with other men, a particular right to seek reparation from him that has done it: and any other person, who finds it just, may also join with him that is injured, and assist him in recovering from the offender so much as may make satisfaction for the harm he has suffered. — John Locke

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it. — Cormac McCarthy

When he showed them to the rebel leader, Tupac Amaru responded "these books are worthless other than to make empanadas or pastries; I'll just impose strong laws." He explained that once in power they would place one official in every town, who would collect the head tax and send it to the city of Cuzco. This program would begin in Cuzco but expand to Arequipa, Lima and Upper Peru. Escarcena also noted that Tupac Amaru told many people that he would get rid of lawyers and jails and simplify punishment. Major criminals would be hanged on the spot while smaller transgressions would be punished by hanging the perpetrator by one foot from the gallows, placed in every town. This streamlined system would not only reduce crime but also "get rid of lawsuits and notaries. — Charles F. Walker

My object all sublime I shall achieve in time- To let the punishment fit the crime- The punishment fit the crime. — W.S. Gilbert

He hired a stenographer, Anna Grigoryevna Snitkina, from the only agency in St Petersburg and dictated The Gambler, before completing Crime and Punishment. A few months later, he married her, one of the smartest moves he ever made. She adored him, bore him four children, cured him of gambling and set his business affairs in order. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

What had Subhash told Bela, to keep her away? Nothing, probably. It was the just punishment for her crime. She understood now what it meant to walk away from her child. It had been her own act of killing. A connection she had severed, resulting in a death that applied only to the two of them. It was a crime worse than anything Udayan had committed. She had never written to Bela. Never dared reach out, to reassure her. What reassurance was hers to give? What she'd done could never be undone. Her silence, her absence, seemed decent in comparison. — Jhumpa Lahiri

What becomes a crime deserving capital punishment when the tables are turned is a matter of small moment when the negro woman is the accusing party. — Ida B. Wells

The guilty is he who meditates a crime; the punishment is his who lays the plot. — Vittorio Alfieri

Defenders of the prosecution seem to think that anyone charged with a felony must somehow deserve punishment. That idea can only be sustained without actual exposure to the legal system. Yes, most of the time prosecutors do chase actual wrongdoers, but today our criminal laws are so expansive that most people of any vigor and spirit can be found to violate them in some way. Basically, under American law, anyone interesting is a felon. The prosecutors, not the law, decide who deserves punishment.

Today, prosecutors feel they have license to treat leakers of information like crime lords or terrorists. In an age when our frontiers are digital, the criminal system threatens something intangible but incredibly valuable. It threatens youthful vigor, difference in outlook, the freedom to break some rules and not be condemned or ruined for the rest of your life. — Tim Wu

In order that punishment should not be an act of violence perpetrated by one or many upon a private citizen, it is essential that it should be public, speedy, necessary, the minimum possible in the given circumstances, proportionate to the crime, and determined by the law. — Cesare Beccaria

It was the large number of outrages on women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan to spring up overnight. And it was against this nocturnal organization that the newspapers of the North cried out most loudly, never realizing the tragic necessity that brought it into being. The North wanted every member of the Ku Klux hunted down and hanged, because they had dared take the punishment of crime into their own hands at a time when the ordinary processes of law and order had been overthrown by the invaders. — Margaret Mitchell

Let the punishment fit the crime. — W.S. Gilbert

And then it happened. It was a detail, no more than that. A detail to which you pay no attention at first. That takes on meaning only later. In retrospect. — Herman Koch

The law which attempts a man's life [capital punishment] is impractical, unjust, inadmissible. It has never repressed crime
for a second crime is every day committed at the foot of the scaffold. — Marquis De Sade

Countries and states which have capital punishment have a much higher rate of murder and crime than countries that do not, so that makes sense to me, and the moral question - I struggle with it morally. — Charlize Theron

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem on others. — Juvenal

Punishment is not for revenge, but to lessen crime and reform the criminal. — Elizabeth Fry

The fact that I had killed a man was really putting a crimp in my love
life.
Well, okay, to be strictly accurate, I hadn't killed him. But I had
helped. And I had watched enough of the Emmy Award-winning cops-andlawyers
drama Crime and Punishment on TV to know that cops weren't very
understanding about that sort of thing. I had even auditioned for the
role of a murderess in a C&P episode the previous year, but I didn't get
the part. So, since I had never even played a killer, actually being one
now was something of a novelty. — Laura Resnick

A strange idea was pecking at his brain like a chicken in the egg, and very, very much absorbed him. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

There is no crime greater, or more worthy of punishment, than being strange and frightened among the strange and frightened; except assimilation to the end of becoming strange and frightened, but apart from ones own real self. — Israel Horovitz

Capital punishment would be more effective as a preventive measure if it were administered prior to the crime. — Woody Allen

I cannot imagine any crime worse than taking a life, can you? -It'd depend whose life. — Brendan Behan

If life was fair ... one third of the people would comprise of judges and lawyers ... one third of police and prison officials ... and one third of legislators ... and one third more to make the other three thirds make any sense at all .... Thank goodness for no fair. — Brian Spellman

A literary creation can appeal to us in all sorts of ways-by its theme, subject, situations, characters. But above all it appeals to us by the presence in it of art. It is the presence of art in Crime and Punishment that moves us deeply rather than the story of Raskolnikov's crime. — Boris Pasternak

It is the certainty of being punished and not the horrifying spectacle of public punishment that must discourage crime — Michel Foucault

Punishment. - A strange thing, our punishment! It does not cleanse the criminal, it is no atonement; on the contrary, it pollutes worse than the crime does. The — Friedrich Nietzsche

You look at the crime and you look at the criminal. If it's a dope dealer who guns down an undercover narcotics officer, then he gets the gas. If it's a drifter who rapes a three-year-old girl, drowns her by holding her little head in a mudhole, then throws her body off a bridge, then you take his life and thank god he's gone. If it's an escaped convict who breaks into a farmhouse late at night and beats and tortures an elderly couple before burning them with their house, then you strap him in a chair, hook up a few wires, pray for his soul, and pull the switch. And if it's two dopeheads who gang-rape a ten-year-old girl and kick her with pointed-toe cowboy boots until her jaws break, then you happily, merrily, thankfully, gleefully lock them in a gas chamber and listen to them squeal. It's very simple. Their crimes were barbaric. Death is too good for them, much too good. — John Grisham

To define his tendency in a word, I would say that Chekhov was the poet of hopelessness. Stubbornly, sadly, monotonously, during all the years of his literary activity, nearly a quarter of a century long, Chekhov was doing one alone: by one means or another he was killing human hopes. Herein, I hold, lies the essence of his creation. Hitherto it has been little spoken of. The reasons are quite intelligible. In ordinary language what Chekhov was doing is called crime, and is visited by condign punishment. But how can a man of talent be punished? — Lev Shestov

I looked it up and sure enough, she was right. The Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution says: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction. Well, that explained a lot of things. That explained why jails and prisons all over the country are filled to the brim with Black and Third World people, why so many Black people can't find a job on the streets and are forced to survive the best way they know how. Once you're in prison, there are plenty of jobs, and, if you don't want to work, they beat you up and throw you in the hole. If every state had to pay workers to do the jobs prisoners are forced to do, the salaries would amount to billions. License plates alone would amount to millions. — Assata Shakur

It's kind of like sentencing. A lot of people say that we have a heavy sentence for this crime and a light sentence for another crime, and what we ought to do is reduce the heavy sentence so it's more in line with the other. Wrong. In most cases we ought to increase the light sentence and make it compatible with the heavy sentence, and be serious about punishment because we are becoming too tolerant as a society, folks, especially of crime, in too many parts of the country. — Rush Limbaugh

Nearly 60 years ago, the international community made a commitment to put an end to the crime of genocide by ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. — Alcee Hastings

Al Qaeda is using our liberal justice system," he continued. I really don't know what liberal justice system he was talking about: the U.S. broke the world record for the number of people it has in prison. Its prison population is over two million, more than any other country in the world, and its rehabilitation programs are a complete failure. The United States is the "democratic" country with the most draconian punishment system; in fact, it is a good example of how draconian punishments do not help in stopping crimes. Europe is by far more just and humane, and the rehab programs there work, so the crime rate in Europe is decisively lower than the U.S. But the American proverb has it, "When the going gets rough, the rough get going." Violence naturally produces violence; the only loan you can make with a guarantee of payback is violence. It might take some time, but you will always get your loan back. — Mohamedou Ould Slahi

And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds? — Kahlil Gibran

Isn't all mankind ultimately executed for a crime it never committed? — Woody Allen

Capital punishment is as fundamentally wrong as a cure for crime as charity is wrong as a cure for poverty. — Henry Ford

Any punishment is an insult to the crime — Nathan Filer

And, pointing a trembling finger at Bonetti-Alderighi, with an expression of indignation and a quasi-castrato voice, he launched into the climax:
Ah, so you, Mr. Commissioner, actually believed such a groundless accusation? Ah, I feel so insulted and humiliated! You're accusing me of an act - no, indeed, a crime that, if true, would warrant a severe punishment! As if I were a common idiot or gambler! That journalist must be possessed to think of such a thing!
End of climax. The inspector inwardly congratulated himself. He had managed to utter a statement using only titles of novels by Dostoyevsky. Had the comissioner noticed? Of course not! The man was ignorant as a goat! — Andrea Camilleri

Plea Against the Death Penalty
Look, examine, reflect. You hold capital punishment up as an example. Why? Because of what it teaches. And just what is it that you wish to teach by means of this example? That thou shalt not kill. And how do you teach that "thou shalt not kill"? By killing.
I have examined the death penalty under each of its two aspects: as a direct action, and as an indirect one. What does it come down to? Nothing but something horrible and useless, nothing but a way of shedding blood that is called a crime when an individual commits it, but is (sadly) called "justice" when society brings it about. Make no mistake, you lawmakers and judges, in the eyes of God as in those of conscience, what is a crime when individuals do it is no less an offense when society commits the deed. — Victor Hugo

How vainly shall we endeavor to repress crime by our barbarous punishment of the poorer class of criminals so long as children are reared in the brutalizing influences of poverty, so long as the bite of want drives men to crime. — Henry George

" You think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth." --Crime and punishment, F. Dostoevsky — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

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

The message has to be sent that if you commit a crime there has to be punishment. — Benigno Aquino III

He found all the people he met repulsive - their faces, their manner of walking, their movements were repulsive to him. He reflected that if anyone had said anything to him he would quite simply have spat at that person, or bitten him ... - Raskolnikov (Crime and Punishment) — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Vengeance and forgiveness are about reconciling the accounts, but accounting is an ugly description of the tangled ways we're connected. I sometimes think everything comes out even in the end, but an end that arches beyond the horizon, beyond our capacity to perceive or measure, and that in many cases those who trespass against you do so out of a misery that means the punishment preceded and even precipitated the crime. Maybe that's acceptance. — Rebecca Solnit

If the Old Testament were a reliable guide in the matter of capital punishment, half the people in the United States would have to be killed tomorrow. — Steve Allen

The real truth is, the number of convicts is too overwhelming for the means of proper and effectual punishment. I despair of any remedy but that which I wish I could hope for - a great reduction in the amount of crime. — Robert Peel

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

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

Don't you believe that the punishment should fit the crime? Isn't that what justice is? Letely, though, I wonder if we've gotten more into vengenance than justice. — Whoopi Goldberg

The ability of so many people to live comfortably with the idea of capital punishment is perhaps a clue to how so many Europeans were able to live with the idea of the Holocaust: Once you accept the notion that the state has the right to kill someone and the right to define what is a capital crime, aren't you halfway there? — Roger Ebert

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

Justice isn't about fixing the past; it's about healing the past's future. — Jackson Burnett

Murder is a horror, but an often necessary horror, never criminal, which it is essential to tolerate in a republican State. Is it or is it not a crime? If it is not, why make laws for its punishment? And if it is, by what barbarous logic do you, to punish it, duplicate it by another crime? — Marquis De Sade

Homosexuality in Russia is a crime and the punishment is seven years in prison, locked up with the other men. There is a three year waiting list. — Yakov Smirnoff

I guess having one hundred and four condoms full of heroin in your guts and the thought of a firing squad in your head make will make most things seem insignificant. — S.A. Tawks

Sociologists have frequently observed that governments use punishment primarily as a tool of social control, and thus the extent or severity of punishment is often unrelated to actual crime patterns. — Michelle Alexander

As an American I wanted to explore ... why are we the only first world country that still has capital punishment? Is it because we're too afraid to really examine the system, or is it because we really truly believe that this is the best way to deter future crime? — Jodi Picoult

But the most heinous crime of the Church has been perpetrated not against churchmen but against churchgoers. With its poisonous concepts of sin and divine punishment, it's warped and brainwashed countless millions. It would be impossible to calculate the psychic damage this has inflicted on generations of children who might have grown up into healthy, happy. productive, zestful human beings but for the burden of antisexual fear and guilt ingrained in them by the Church. This alone is enough to condemn religion. — Madalyn Murray O'Hair

As the data from the past decade clarify, there is no evidence that poverty causes crime but a great deal of evidence that crime causes poverty. By aligning themselves against the police, against commonsense tactics like stop and frisk, against metal detectors in public housing, against swift and certain punishment, and for a broad array of legal protections for accused criminals, liberals helped to aggrieve the lives of the poor and society as a whole. — Mona Charen

I tend to listen to music more than I read. I need to get into reading a bit more. The stuff I tend to read is usually non-fiction books more than fiction, but I've been trying to power my way through Dostoevsky's 'Crime and Punishment,' and I do enjoy it. — Isaac Hempstead-Wright

Life [had] replaced logic. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

I got on a Dostoyevsky kick right after college. I started with 'Crime and Punishment,' went on to 'The Possessed' and then 'The Brothers Karamazov' and 'The Idiot.' — Charlie Trotter

They weren't on a yacht that was devoured by a hurricane. Yet they vanished. They weren't in a private plane that dropped off the radar in a remote area. Yet they vanished. They're home wasn't washed away in a flood, they weren't on the run from the law and didn't owe the mafia a bunch of money but they vanished, without reason and without a trace.
The Prophet of Life From The Family That Vanished — The Prophet Of Life

This is a boy's lot: anything he does, anything whatever, may afterward turn out to have been a crime - he never knows. And punishment and clemency are alike inexplicable. — Booth Tarkington

Upon this, I (who took the boldness to speak freely before the Cardinal) said, 'There was no reason to wonder at the matter, since this way of punishing thieves was neither just in itself nor good for the public; for, as the severity was too great, so the remedy was not effectual; simple theft not being so great a crime that it ought to cost a man his life; no punishment, how severe soever, being able to restrain those from robbing who can find out no other way of livelihood. — Thomas More

I intend to see that justice is done by presiding, in the manner of the omnipotent Walter Mitty, as chief justice of a tribunal trying the case of those plotting further advances for the Chinese characters on an international scale. Emulating the operatic Mikado's "object all sublime... to let the punishment fit the crime," I hand down the following dread decree:

Anyone who believes Chinese characters to be a superior system of writing that can function as a universal script is condemned to complete the task of rendering the whole of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address into Singlish.
— John DeFrancis

The criminal left belongs not in a dormitory, but in a penitentiary. — Spiro T. Agnew

He is the thief man who steals away your youth in the middle of the night. He is the evil whose shadow engenders fear in rural areas. He is the bogyman who keeps children up at night. He is the terrorist who claims to be enforcing the Ten Commandments while he breaks most of them.
The Prophet of Life From: The Most Notorious Serial Killer You've Likely Never Heard of i — The Prophet Of Life

Let someone who was not from among the convicts try reproaching a prisoner for his crime and abusing him (though it's not in the Russian spirit to reproach a criminal)
there would be no end of cursing. — Fyodor Dostoyevsky

As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, 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

I'm so much happier now that I'm dead. Technically missing. Soon to be presumed dead. Gone. And my lazy lying shitting oblivious husband will go to prison for my murder. Nick Dunne took my pride and my dignity and my hope and my money. He took and took from me until I no longer existed. That's murder. Let the punishment fit the crime. — Gillian Flynn

It was slightly after midnight. Hundreds of people were at a movie theater watching the midnight showing of the opening day of the new Batman movie. Suddenly a man appeared from a side entrance. He was dressed in battle gear and appeared to have a gun. A few patrons were concerned. Many others thought he was part of a promotion for the film. Most of the crowd didn't notice him.
The Prophet of Life From: Midnight Movie Massacre — The Prophet Of Life

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

Thoughts and actions which, when detected, mean certain death are not formally forbidden, and the endless purges, arrests, tortures, imprisonments and vaporisations are not inflicted as punishment for crimes which have actually been committed, but are merely the wiping-out of persons who might perhaps commit a crime at some time in the future. — George Orwell

I wanted to show that crime doesn't pay. If you are saved and accept the Lord, you cannot use that as an excuse to avoid punishment. — Robert Duvall

Fear follows crime and is its punishment. — Voltaire

Crime and punishment can be summed up in two classifications: there are bad people and there are people who get into bad situations. The lines for liberation and rehabilitation should first begin with the people who get into bad situations. — Johnnie Dent Jr.