Retributive Justice Quotes

[On Senator Jesse Helms] I think he ought to be worried about what's going on in the Good Lord's mind, because if there is retributive justice, he'll get AIDS from a transfusion, or one of his grandchildren will. ~ Nina Totenberg

If our social justice is guided by retribution, we will simply perpetuate the use and abuse of power to inflict violence. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

If the Pope were to deny that the death penalty could be an exercise of retributive justice, he would be overthrowing the tradition of two millenia of Catholic thought, denying the teaching of several previous popes, and contradicting the teaching of Scripture. ~ Avery Dulles

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

I can establish the expectation of retributive justice. Have we done that? No. ~ Paddy Ashdown

There are different kinds of justice. Retributive justice is largely Western. The African underTutustanding is far more restorative - not so much to punish as to redress or restore a balance that has been knocked askew. ~ Desmond Tutu

Throughout the biblical story, from Genesis to Revelation, every radical challenge from the biblical God is both asserted and then subverted by its receiving communities - be they earliest Israelites or latest Christians. That pattern of assertion-and-subversion, that rhythm of expansion-and-contraction, is like the systole-and-diastole cycle of the human heart.

In other words, the heartbeat of the Christian Bible is a recurrent cardiac cycle in which the asserted radicality of God's nonviolent distributive justice is subverted by the normalcy of civilization's violent retributive justice. And, of course, the most profound annulment is that both assertion and subversion are attributed to the same God or the same Christ.

Think of this example. In the Bible, prophets are those who speak for God. On one hand, the prophets Isaiah and Micah agree on this as God's vision: "they shall beat their swords into plowshares, / and their spears into pruning hooks; / nation shall not lift up sword against nation, / neither shall they learn war any more" (Isa. 2:4 = Mic. 4:3). On the other hand, the prophet Joel suggests the opposite vision: "Beat your plowshares into swords, / and your pruning hooks into spears; / let the weakling say, 'I am a warrior'" (3:10). Is this simply an example of assertion-and-subversion between prophets, or between God's radicality and civilization's normalcy?

That proposal might also answer how, as noted in Chapter 1, Jesus the ~ John Dominic Crossan

What is it, I wonder, that they hope to Correct? I am what I am, irredeemably, irretrievably, implacably - as are mostof my fellow desperadoes here in Correctional Facility.
We are monsters. ~ Jeff Lindsay

The cycle of reprisal and counter reprisal that had characterized their national history had to be broken and that the only way to do this was to go beyond retributive justice to restorative justice, to move on to forgiveness, because without it there was no future. ~ Desmond Tutu

It is entirely possible to work for justice without thirsting for blood. ~ Jamie Arpin-Ricci

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. ~ Lewis B. Smedes

Justice in the life and conduct of the State is possible only as first it resides in the hearts and souls of the citizens. ~ Plato

With his face all scrunched up and twisted with anger, he looked just like Draco Malfoy in Harry Potter. Sometimes when someone is making an idiot of themselves, especially on live television, it's just better to let them go ahead. ~ Cecile Richards

On the subject of Osama bin Laden ... we will track him down. We will capture him. We will bring him to justice, and I will follow him to the gates of hell. ~ John McCain

The administration of private justice between the citizens of the same state, the supervision of agriculture and of other concerns of a similar nature, all those things in short which are proper to be provided for by local legislation, can never be desirable cares of a general jurisdiction ... the attempt to exercise these powers would be as troublesome as it would be nugatory; and the possession of them, for that reason, would contribute nothing to the dignity, to the importance, or to the splendour of the national government. ~ Alexander Hamilton

The death penalty is used in such a blatantly racist way in the United States. There is no way that can be defended under any kind of definition of justice by anybody. ~ Assata Shakur

Let us not be justices of the peace, but angels of peace. ~ Therese Of Lisieux

God's justice and love are one. Infinite justice must be infinite love. Justice is but another sign of love. ~ Frederick William Robertson

What is justice? Two forces collide. Each may have the right in his own sphere. And here's where an Emperor commands orderly solutions. Those collisions he cannot prevent
he solves. ~ Frank Herbert

Justice. If only we knew what it was. ~ Socrates

There is no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty. ~ George Farquhar

Obama's judges share his contempt for the original meaning of the Constitution. He has long seen the U.S. Constitution as an obstacle to what he considers progress. In a 2001 interview that surfaced during the 2008 presidential campaign, he made this very clear: the Supreme Court under Justice Earl Warren had failed to break "free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution," Obama told the host of a radio show. ~ Phyllis Schlafly

Every day I shall put my papers in order and every day I shall say farewell. And the real farewell, when it comes, will only be a small outward confirmation of what has been accomplished within me from day to day. ~ Etty Hillesum

Love is injustice, but justice doesn't suffice. ~ Albert Camus

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Since the state must necessarily provide subsistence for the criminal poor while undergoing punishment, not to do the same for the poor who have not offended is to give a premium on crime. ~ John Stuart Mill

The injustice done to an individual is sometimes of service to the public. ~ Junius

What I have told you is not completely true. You should beware, for often in this story, my words will be spoken out of bitterness, out of hate. The scream of the poor is not always just; but if you do not listen to it, then you will never understand justice. ~ Erik Christian Haugaard

No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved to any people, but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality and virtue. ~ George Mason

We're a people who pollute the very air we breathe. And our rivers. We're destroying the great lakes; Erie is already gone, and now we've begun on the oceans. We filled our atmosphere with radioactive fallout that put poison into our children's bones, and we knew it. We've made bombs that can wipe out humanity in minutes, and they are aimed and ready to fire. We ended polio, and then the United States Army bred new strains of germs that can cause fatal, incurable disease. We had a chance to do justice to our Negroes, and when they asked it, we refused. In Asia we burned people alive, we really did. We allow children to grow up malnourished in the United States. We allow people to make money by using our television channels to pursued our own children to smoke, knowing what it is going to do to them. This is a time when it becomes harder and harder to continue telling yourself that we are still good people. We hate each other. And we're used to it. ~ Jack Finney

The brotherhood of men does not imply their equality. Families have their fools and their men of genius, their black sheep and their saints, their worldly successes and their worldly failures. A man should treat his brothers lovingly and with justice, according to the deserts of each. But the deserts of every brother are not the same. ~ Aldous Huxley

This concept of the afterlife really functions as a substitute for wisdom. It functions as a substitute for really absorbing our predicament, which is that everyone is going to die; there are circumstances that are just catastrophically unfair; evil sometimes wins and injustice sometimes wins, and that the only justice we are going to find in the world is the justice we make.
We have an ethical responsibility to absorb this, really down to the soles of our feet. And this notion of an afterlife, of how it's all going to work out and its all part of god's plan, is a way of shirking that responsibility. ~ Sam Harris

There is no more moving a professional relationship than that between a law clerk and a Supreme Court justice. As a place to work, the court is unique in its intimacy and intensity. ~ Cliff Sloan

Kindness is the excuse that social justice warriors use when they want to exercise control over what other people think and say. ~ Jordan B. Peterson

Someone else deciding what was too dangerous for me to be involved in or pursue had never stopped me yet. ~ Gwenda Bond

We, the Sworn Sisterhood, do solemnly vow to take back Acadia from those who are responsible for the scourge of the dragon and the tempests. We will fight them with our hands and our weapons. We will fight them with the power of our conviction. We will face the enemy without fear. We will take the enemy down and bring the enemy to justice and there is nothing that can stand in our way. ~ Mercedes Lackey

Polish your wisdom: learn public justice, distinguish between good and evil, study the ways of different arts one by one. ~ Miyamoto Musashi

More than once, the broken moon would cast through the window a silver light and remind me of independent events yielding to their own momentum and interacting under natural laws while my mind would impose happiness, grief, beauty, ruin, justice and chaos. ~ Leonard Seet

justice is everywhere and it's working ~ Charles Bukowski

A man's thoughts can change his entire life;Whatever you cannot perceive, you cannot receive. ~ Justice Clement

The truth! Since when have the majority on Earth cared about the truth? ~ Robert Peate

The chief-justice was rich, quiet, and infamous. ~ Thomas B. Macaulay

Law and justice are not the same. ~ John Connolly

For your Jesus said you're supposed to give the oppressed a better deal ~ Kev Carmody

Law is justice. In this proposition a simple and enduring government can be conceived. And I defy anyone to say how even the thought of revolution, of insurrection, of the slightest uprising could arise against a government whose organized force was confined only to suppressing injustice. ~ Frederic Bastiat

What are kingdoms without justice? They're just gangs of bandits. ~ Saint Augustine

One cannot do justice to Marx without recognizing his sincerity. His open-mindedness, his sense of facts, his distrust of verbiage, and especially of moralizing verbiage, made him one of the world's most influential fighters against hypocrisy and pharisaism. He had a burning desire to help the oppressed, and was fully conscious of the need for proving himself in deeds, and not only in words. His main talents being theoretical, he devoted immense labour to forging what he believed to be scientific weapons for the fight to improve the lot of the vast majority of men. His sincerity in his search for truth and his intellectual honesty distinguish him, I believe, from many of his followers (although unfortunately he did not altogether escape the corrupting influence of an upbringing in the atmosphere of Hegelian dialectics, described by Schopenhauer as 'destructive of all intelligence'). Marx's interest in social science and social philosophy was fundamentally a practical interest. He saw in knowledge a means of promoting the progress of man. ~ Karl Popper