Punitive Quotes & Sayings

A world that begins to witness the rebirth of trust among nations can find its way to a peace that is neither partial nor punitive. With all who will work in good faith toward such a peace, we are ready, with renewed resolve, to strive to redeem the near-lost hopes of our day. — Dwight D. Eisenhower

Whatever its origins, the psychology of sacredness helps bind individuals into moral communities.42 When someone in a moral community desecrates one of the sacred pillars supporting the community, the reaction is sure to be swift, emotional, collective, and punitive. To — Jonathan Haidt

Several researchers demonstrate the ways people fail to label trauma as such or underreport traumatic experiences. In a sample of 1,526 university students, Rausch and Knutson (1991) found that although participants reported receiving punitive treatment similar to that of their siblings, they were more than twice as likely to identify their siblings' experiences as abusive as they were to label their own in this way. The authors reported that participants were likely to interpret parental treatment toward themselves but not parental treatment toward their siblings as deserved and therefore not abusive. Other studies similarly indicate that those reporting abuse experiences often do not demonstrate a metaconsciousness of having been abused (Goldsmith & Freyd, in press; Koss, 1998; Varia & Abidin, 1999; Weinbach & Curtiss, 1986).
KNOWING AND NOT KNOWING ABOUT TRAUMA: IMPLICATIONS FOR THERAPY (2004) — Jennifer J. Freyd

Punitive murder by the police and by vigilantes has existed in all societies at some point, and probably still exists in most. — Teju Cole

She would always be careful around people like Parley Burns, tricky people who are thin skinned and punitive and intelligent and surprisingly honest. — Elizabeth Hay

There are some things, but not too many, toward which the countryman knows he must be properly respectful if he would avoid pain, sickness and injury. Nature is neither punitive nor solicitous, but she has thorns and fangs as wells as bowers and grassy banks. — Hal Borland

Two questions help us see why we are unlikely to get what we want by using punishment ... The first question is: What do I want this person to do that's different from what he or she is currently doing? If we ask only this first question, punishment may seem effective because the threat or exercise of punitive force may well influence the person's behavior. However, with the second question, it becomes evident that punishment isn't likely to work: What do I want this person's reasons to be for doing what I'm asking? — Marshall B. Rosenberg

God initiates the salvation of man to express the Father's love, not a punitive deflecting of the Father's anger. — Garry Wills

If you accept a punitive notion of God, who punishes or even eternally tortures those who do not love him, then you have an absurd universe where most people on this earth end up being more loving than God! — Richard Rohr

Tragedy happens - "tragic mistakes" happen - when men act according to their flawed natures, in fulfillment of their preordained destinies. The tragedy of the four killers of Amadou Diallo is that their deeds were made possible by their general preconceptions about black people and poor neighborhoods; by a theory of policing that encourages them to be rigid and punitive toward petty offenders; and by a social context in which the possession and use of firearms is so normative as to be almost beyond discussion. The tragedy of the street vendor Amadou Diallo is that he came as an innocent to the slaughter, made vulnerable by poverty and by the color of his skin. And the tragedy of America is that a nation which sees itself as leading the world toward a global future in which the American values of freedom and justice will be available for everyone fails so frequently and so badly to guarantee that freedom and that justice for so many people within its own frontiers. — Salman Rushdie

It's more common to ignore the epidemic of punitive parenting and focus instead on the occasional example of permissiveness - sometimes even to the point of pronouncing an entire generation spoiled. It's revealing, and even somewhat amusing, that similar alarms probably have been raised about every generation throughout recorded history. — Alfie Kohn

We're seeking - imperfectly at every turn, no doubt - an incarnational theology, a theology that brings radical good news of great joy for all the people, good news that God loves the world and didn't send Jesus to condemn it but to save it, good news that God's wrath is not merely punitive but restorative, good news that the fire of God's holiness is not bent on eternal torment but always works to purify and refine, good news that where sin abounds, grace abounds all the more. — Brian D. McLaren

Clearly our first task is to use the material wealth of space to solve the urgent problems we now face on Earth: to bring the poverty-stricken segments of the world up to a decent living standard, without recourse to war or punitive action against those already in material comfort; to provide for a maturing civilization the basic energy vital to its survival. — Gerard K. O'Neill

The U.S. government did not seem to recognize that its punitive foreign policies, its military installations in countries all over the globe, might arouse anger in foreign countries, and that anger might turn to violence. — Howard Zinn

It is an enduring truth, which can never be altered, that every infraction of the Law of nature must carry its punitive consequences with it. We can never get beyond that range of cause and effect. — Thomas Troward

It is long settled in California that a landlord who resorts to self-help [such as removing a tenant's personal belongings and changing the locks, even though the tenant is still in legal possession of the property] instead of invoking the unlawful detainer procedure commits a forcible entry and detainer, and is liable for actual and, sometimes, punitive damages (see Jordan v Talbot (1961) 55 C2d 597), regardless of any lease provision giving the landlord the right to reenter on default (55 C2d at 604) or any lien the landlord may wish to exercise (55 C2d at 609). — Myron Moskovitz

The greatest challenge to most innovation centers around the world is many nations' punitive attitudes towards failure. In most of the world, if your first business fails, no one will work with you again. But, trial and error is the genesis of innovation. — Jay Samit

There is no "universal moral urge" and not all ethical systems agree. Polygamy, human sacrifice, infanticide, cannibalism (Eucharist), wife beating, self-mutilation, foot binding, preemptive war, torture of prisoners, circumcision, female genital mutilation, racism, sexism, punitive amputation, castration and incest are perfectly "moral" in certain cultures. Is god confused? — Dan Barker

Remember that veganism is a compassionate lifestyle not a punitive religion. Enjoy it! And if the going gets rough, it's better to relax the rules occasionally than to give up the game entirely. — Karen Dawn

I think God is everything. Human beings created the punitive, vengeful deity who considers us to be innate sinners. — Alanis Morissette

For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, "The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does." — Anna Quindlen

We will have bigger bureaucracies, bigger labor unions, and bigger state-run corporations. It will be harder to be an entrepreneur because of punitive taxes and regulations. The rewards of success will be expropriated for the sake of attaining greater income equality. — Arthur C. Brooks

You will find that women who are pregnant often don't want to be and women who aren't desperately envy those who are. Labour wards are always full of very punitive people. — Fay Weldon

We call our system the Department of Corrections, or simply Corrections, but correcting or any notion of rehabilitation has been largely thrown to the wayside in favor of punitive action through the revocation of selfhood. — Erika Camplin

He was so handsome I felt like filing a civil lawsuit against his parents, claiming punitive damages, pain and suffering to my psyche. — Penny Reid

As a parent, you may sometimes react in frustration, wanting to break his will or mete out some severe punishment in order to bring him down a notch and make him more docile. But even Father Hock back in the early 1930s recognized that much care must be taken not to cause the choleric to become hardened and embittered by harsh and punitive discipline: [B]y hard, proud treatment the choleric is not improved, but embittered and hardened; whereas even a very proud choleric can easily be influenced by reasonable suggestions and supernatural motives . . . it is absolutely necessary to remain calm and to allow the choleric to "cool off" and then to persuade him to accept guidance in order to correct his faults. . . .11 — Art Bennett

As I recall this I realize how open we are to the persistent message that we can avert death. And to its punitive correlative, the message that if death catches us we have only ourselves to blame. Only — Joan Didion

Anger is a signal that you're distracted by judgmental or punitive thinking, and that some precious need of yours is being ignored. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

He is prepared to bear with them patiently 'so far as it is possible' : that is to say, he trusts that punitive expeditions or annexations may not be necessary. The — E.J. Rapson

Fifteen years later, in 1601, Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde was devoted to showing man how wretched he had become through his inability to control his passions. This study, designed to help man know himself in all his depravity, emphasised sin rather than salvation, claiming that the animal passions prevented reason, rebelled against virtue and, like 'thornie briars sprung from the infected roote of original sinne', caused mental and physical ill health.20 Despite its punitive message, the book went into further editions in 1604, 1620, 1621 and 1628, suggesting that the seventeenth-century reader was a glutton for punishment. — Catharine Arnold

In every community there is a class of people profoundly dangerous to the rest. I don't mean the criminals. For them we have punitive sanctions. I mean the leaders. Invariably the most dangerous people seek the power. While in the parlors of indignation the right-thinking citizen brings his heart to a boil. (p. 51) — Saul Bellow

Punitive measures whether administered by police, teachers, spouses or parents have well known standard effects: (1) escape-education has its own name for that: truancy, (2) counterattack-vandalism on schools and attacks on teachers, (3) apathy-a sullen do-nothing withdrawal. The more violent the punishment, the more serious the by-products. — B.F. Skinner

The campus response was now swift and punitive and overwhelming. The days of peaceful sit-ins had ended, even though two buildings were more-or-less peacefully occupied now. The illusion that Stanhope College would be spared the violence of the cities of the mid-sixties and the campuses such as Berkeley Wisconsin and Columbia, to name a few, was exposed. — Norman Giddan

America is a nation fundamentally ambivalent about its children, often afraid of its children, and frequently punitive toward its children. — Letty Cottin Pogrebin

There is no doubt that the countries that now have a very large debt have not introduced the kind of structural reforms that Germany did and are therefore at a disadvantage. But the problem is that this disadvantage is becoming even more pronounced through the punitive policies in place. — George Soros

I'm thrilled with the work Tim Palen and his marketing team have done on the film. It's appropriately disturbing and thought-provoking how the campaign promotes 'Catching Fire' while simultaneously promoting the Capitol's punitive forms of entertainment. — Suzanne Collins

Job creation requires a business friendly environment with a tax structure that is not punitive and a state government designed for efficient use of fewer tax dollars. — Kenneth Blackwell

Consequences of breaking the rules should fit the rule broken and should have the aim of teaching her the repercussions of antisocial behavior; they should not have the aim of being punitive. — Virginia Beane Rutter

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

Rarely has a diplomatic document so missed its objective as the Treaty of Versailles. Too punitive for conciliation, too lenient to keep Germany from recovering, the Treaty of Versailles condemned the exhausted democracies to constant vigilance against an irreconcilable and revanchist Germany as well as a revolutionary Soviet Union. — Henry Kissinger

Those jobs flee other states because of factors like excessive taxation, punitive regulation and frivolous lawsuits. — Rick Perry

By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice. — Thomas Szasz

Nothing is more punitive than to give a disease a meaning - that meaning being invariably a moralistic one. — Susan Sontag

The undisciplined child enters into discipline by working in the company of others; not being told he is naughty." "Discipline is, therefore, primarily a learning experience and less a punitive experience if appropriately dealt with. — Maria Montessori

I don't want to pass a punitive law, or use politics as a vendetta. — Romano Prodi

We proceeded systematically, village by village and we destroyed the houses, filled up the wells, blew down the towers, cut down the shady trees, burned the crops and broke the reservoirs in punitive devastation. — Winston Churchill

No one sleeps in Hell except as a possible defensive posture in retaliation during yet another punitive presentation of The English Patient. — Chuck Palahniuk

So perhaps it's time to switch the focus of some of our workplace policies and use them to unshackle the hardworking majority rather than inhibit the less noble minority. If you think people in your organization are predisposed to rip you off, maybe the solution isn't to build a tighter, more punitive set of rules. Maybe the answer is to hire new people. — Daniel H. Pink

If you feel strongly about people having abortions, don't have one. But we are a country [USA] that likes to be punitive. We want to restrict. It is a kind of religious fervor run amuck. — John Irving

Education is one of the most beautiful and liberating things we can pursue in our lives, but too often it is approached as a restrictive, punitive, linear, and moralistic act. — Jonathan Mooney

In my view, there are two fundamentally different ways one can respond to a child who does something wrong. One is to impose a punitive consequence. Another is to see the situation as a "teachable moment," an opportunity to educate or to solve a problem together. The response here is not "You've misbehaved; now here's what I'm going to do to you" but "Something has gone wrong; what can we do about it? — Alfie Kohn

One might go on to say that perhaps justice fails to be done only if the concept we entertain of justice is retributive justice, whose chief goal is to be punitive, so that the wronged party is really the state, something impersonal, which has little consideration for the real victims and almost none for the perpetrator. We contend that there is another kind of justice, restorative justice, which was characteristic of traditional African jurisprudence. Here the central concern is not retribution or punishment. In the spirit of ubuntu, the central concern is the healing of breaches, the redressing of imbalances, the restoration of broken relationships, a seeking to rehabilitate both the victim and the perpetrator, who should be given the opportunity to be reintegrated into the community he has injured by his offense. — Desmond Tutu

FRYING-PAN, n. One part of the penal apparatus employed in that punitive institution, a woman's kitchen. The frying-pan was invented by Calvin, and by him used in cooking span-long infants that had died without baptism; and observing one day the horrible torment of a tramp who had incautiously pulled a fried babe from the waste-dump and devoured it, it occurred to the great divine to rob death of its terrors by introducing the frying-pan into every household in Geneva. Thence it spread to all corners of the world, and has been of invaluable assistance in the propagation of his sombre faith. — Ambrose Bierce

Cottage cheese is one of our culture's most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: this substance is self-punitive; ingest with caution. — Caroline Knapp

There must be a punitive expedition against the Jews in Russia, a punitive expedition which will expect: death sentence and execution. Then the world will see the end of the Jews is also the end of Bolshevism. — Julius Streicher

All the forms of double taxation in the current system are punitive and self-destructive because they are literally destroying people's incentive to provide that seed corn for future economic growth. — Daniel J. Mitchell

Regarding the biblical account as put forth in the Hexateuch or first six books of the Bible, including the Pentateuch and Joshua, Redford next remarks: There is no mention of an Egyptian empire encompassing the eastern Mediterranean, no marching Egyptian armies bent on punitive campaigns, no countermarching Hittite forces, no resident governors, no Egyptianized kinglets ruling Canaanite cities, no burdensome tribute or cultural exchange. — D.M. Murdock

The law of karma is neither fatalistic nor punitive; nor is man a hapless, helpless victim in its bonds. God has blessed each one of us with reason, intellect and discrimination, as well as the sovereign free will. Even when our past karma inclines us toward evil, we can consciously tune our inclination towards detachment and ego-free action, thus lightening the karmic load. — Dada Vaswani

Do we need recourse to a happier state before the law in order to maintain that contemporary gender relations and the punitive production of gender identities are oppressive? — Judith Butler

Behavior used to be reinforced by great deprivation; if people weren't hungry, they wouldn't work. Now we are committed to feeding people whether they work or not. Nor is money as great a reinforcer as it once was. People no longer work for punitive reasons, yet our culture offers no new satisfactions. — B.F. Skinner

Many parents lack a biblical view of discipline. They tend to think of discipline as revenge - getting even with the children for what they did. Hebrews 12 makes it clear that discipline is not punitive, but corrective. Hebrews 12 calls discipline a word of encouragement that addresses sons. It says discipline is a sign of God's identification with us as our Father. God disciplines us for our good that we might share in his holiness. It says that while discipline is not pleasant, but painful, it yields a harvest of righteousness and peace. Rather than being something to balance love, it is the deepest expression of love. — Tedd Tripp

God was treated like this powerful, erratic, rather punitive father who has to be pacified and praised. You know, flattered. — John Cleese

The public expects sentences to be punitive but also rehabilitative; however, what we expect and what we get from our prisons are very different things. The lesson that our prison system teaches its residents is how to survive as a prisoner, not as a citizen - not a very constructive body of knowledge for us or the communities to which we return. — Piper Kerman

The sales tax is the best and most equitable tax. The gasoline tax, which is nothing but a sales tax, has proven painless, productive and punitive. Everything we buy should have its equal proportion of tax, outside of cheap food and cheap clothes. — Will Rogers

Austen is a moralist, but, as John Lauber has put it, she is not a "punitive" moralist. Sometimes her villains receive no more serious punishment than to achieve their desires. Often that is punishment enough. — Peter J. Leithart

adolescent who expresses dissident opinion more or less vocally can end up in a place like that. Some of the children arrive there from orphanages. If a child tries to run away from an orphanage, it is considered normal in our country to commit him to a psychiatric facility and treat him with the strongest of sedatives, such as aminazine, used to suppress Soviet dissidents back in the 1970s. This is particularly shocking considering these institutions' general punitive trend and the absence of psychological help as such. All communication there is based on fear and the children's forced subjugation. They become exponentially more cruel as a result. Many of the children are illiterate, but no one makes an effort to do anything about that. On the contrary, they do everything to quash the last remnants of any motivation to grow. The children shut down and stop trusting words. I — Masha Gessen

In the museums we used to visit on family vacations when I was a kid, I used to love those rooms which displayed collections of minerals in a kind of closet or chamber which would, at the push of a button, darken. Then ultraviolet lights would begin to glow and the minerals would seem to come alive, new colors, new possibilities, and architectures revealed. Plain stones became fantastic, "futuristic ... " Of course there wasn't any black light in the center of the earth, in the caves where they were quarried; how strange that these stones should have to be brought here, bathed with this unnatural light in order for their transcendent characters to emerge. Irradiation revealed a secret aspect of the world.
Imagine illness as this light; demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears. I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible. — Mark Doty

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency - issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights - the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious. — Gregory S. Paul

As a governor, I've signed virtually every kind of pro-life legislation that we can sign under existing federal law, none of which have been harsh or punitive, but I think they've been important to really point out a pro-life culture in Arkansas. That's, for me, a good thing. — Mike Huckabee

Ubiquitous surveillance means that anyone could be convicted of lawbreaking, once the police set their minds to it. It is incredibly dangerous to live in a world where everything you do can be stored and brought forward as evidence against you at some later date. There is significant danger in allowing the police to dig into these large data sets and find "evidence" of wrongdoing, especially in a country like the US with so many vague and punitive laws, which give prosecutors discretion over whom to charge with what, and with overly broad material witness laws. This is especially true given the expansion of the legally loaded terms "terrorism," to include conventional criminals, and "weapons of mass destruction," to include almost anything, including a sawed-off shotgun. The US terminology is so broad that someone who donates $10 to Hamas's humanitarian arm could be considered a terrorist. — Bruce Schneier

Bush is almost always clear when he's speaking cruelly. For example, when the subject is the punitive infliction of great pain, there is no problem with his syntax, grammar, or vocabulary, even if he happens to be lying ... On the other hand, our president is extraordinarily tongue-tied when he's trying, off the cuff, to sound a note of idealism, magnanimity or
especially
compassion. — Mark Crispin Miller

The punitive measures against murder underscore the gravity of the crime precisely because of the value of the victim. — R.C. Sproul

The punitive use of force tends to generate hostility and to reinforce resistance to the very behavior we are seeking. — Marshall B. Rosenberg

The notion of general devastation had for Maria a certain sedative effect (the rattlesnake in the playpen, that was different, that was particular, that was punitive), suggested an instant in which all anxieties would be abruptly gratified, and between the earthquake prophecy and the marijuana and the cheerful detachment of the woman whose house was in the Tajunga Wash, she felt a kind of resigned tranquility. — Joan Didion

The America of Obama's dreams is not the one of self-reliance and entrepreneurship to which he paid phony lip service at the beginning of his speech. It is an America in which the government, rather than the private sector, creates wealth and leads ignorant, helpless people by the nose from cradle to grave, from preschool to the academy, with the caveat that if they succeed too much, they will make themselves enemies of the state and targets for punitive action. Obama's new American dreams is an American nightmare. — David Limbaugh

Punitive ghosts like steam-driven tennis courts
haunt the apples in my nonexistent orchard.
I remember when there were just worms out there
and they danced in moonlit cores on warm September
nights. — Richard Brautigan

The Governor of Syria, when he heard of this horrid act called a council of his staff to decide whether Mithridates should be avenged by a punitive expedition against his murderer, who now reigned in his stead; but the general opinion seemed to be that the more treacherous and bloody the behaviour of Eastern kings on our frontier, the better for us - the security of the Roman Empire resting on the mutual mistrust of our neighbours - and that nothing should be done. — Robert Graves