Retributive Justice Quotes

If a company has acted badly, people want to punish it - not in order to deter future misconduct, but simply because they're outraged. And the more outraged they are, the more punishment they want to inflict.

The mills of God work like lightning compared with the law.

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.

History is not merely a procession of people in fancy dress fighting wars. It is crucially the story of man's evolution from grunting cave dweller to serious thinker, from cruelly retributive law to merciful law, from casual barbarism to care and compassion.

Revenge is a dish that tastes best when served cold.

Revenge is a kind of wild justice.

I shall not pretend to be an admirer of old John Brown any farther than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any apothegm of a sage, whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden sentences, as from that saying, (perhaps falsely attributed to so honored a source,) that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has "made the Gallows as venerable as the Cross!" Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his martyrdom fairly, and took it firmly.

Revenge... is like a rolling stone, which, when a man hath forced up a hill, will return upon him with a greater violence, and break those bones whose sinews gave it motion.

Sweet is revenge-especially to women.

Revenge is fever in our own blood, to be cured only by letting the blood of another; but the remedy too often produces a relapse, which is remorse--a malady far more dreadful than the first disease, because it is incurable.

The gods visit the sins of the fathers upon the children.

Retributive justice did not arise from any Christian principle; almost every pre-Christian society dealt with wrongdoers by causing them pain.

Here's a more controversial idea: In general, Democrats and progressives ought to allow Trump considerable room to choose his own employees - far more room than Republicans allowed during the Obama administration. Tit-for-tat is a dangerous game.

An eye for an eye is elemental.

Where I come from we believe in an eye for an eye. That's what we do. That's just the way it is.

And so you take criminal caitiffs, murderers, and the like, and hang them on gibbets "for an example to deter others." Whereupon arise friends of humanity, and object. With very great reason, as I consider, if your hypothesis be correct. What right have you to hang any poor creature "for an example"? He can turn round upon you and say, "Why make an 'example' of me, a merely ill-situated, pitiable man? Have you no more respect for misfortune? Misfortune, I have been told, is sacred. And yet you hang me, now I am fallen into your hands; choke the life out of me, for an example! Again I ask, Why make an example of me, for your own convenience alone?

Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it.

No place indeed should murder sanctuarize; Revenge should have no bounds.

I did not defend myself. I say a life for a life.

Life for life, eye for eye, nose for nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth, wounds equal for equal

When poor and ordinary Americans who commit crimes are prosecuted and imprisoned, that is Justice. When the same thing is done to Washington elites, that is Ugly Retribution.

Recompense injury with justice, and recompense kindness with kindness.

The man who does ill must suffer ill.

Restorative justice is not a replacement of retributive justice, but a complement. It seeks the rehabilitation of the wrongdoer and the repair of the victim's injury.

You kill men for the wrongs they have done, not the wrongs that they may do someday.