Hester Prynne Punishment Quotes

1. "Suffering often draws us closer to God. Instead of being a sign of God's punishment or distance, suffering can purify us, lead us into the heart of God, and transform our souls."
Author: Allen R. Hunt

2. "Severe punishment unquestionably has an immediate effect in reducing a tendency to act in a given way. This result is no doubt responsible for its widespread use. We 'instinctively' attack anyone whose behavior displeases us - perhaps not in physical assault, but with criticism, disapproval, blame, or ridicule. Whether or not there is an inherited tendency to do this, the immediate effect of the practice is reinforcing enough to explain its currency. In the long run, however, punishment does not actually eliminate behavior from a repertoire, and its temporary achievement is obtained at tremendous cost in reducing the over-all efficiency and happiness of the group. (p. 190)"
Author: B.F. Skinner

3. "Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short."
Author: Carl Sagan

4. "I think he has a girlfriend? Not sure though, he just seems to be off limits to all women here—well you know the other single women teachers. Maybe he's gay?""I seriously doubt that one." I responded struggling not to laugh."That would be a serious punishment to women kind. I wonder what he looks like without that vest and tie teacher getup…I bet he looks amazing naked.""Holy crap Jaz!" I yelped, but I knew I was blushing. I knew what he looked like with his shirt off and it was damned good."
Author: Cassandra Giovanni

5. "Son of a beast tried to bite me when I turned my back to the billets!"...Nostrils flaring and ears pinned, the grey repeated the offense. "He wants another go at it. Be a sport ol' man!" Robert chortled. The indignant Scotsman threw the reins in his face, tromping off to collect the major's horse."I wonder was it reward or punishment Winthrop had in mind in allowing you to keep that brute?" Drake innocently inquired."He only eats Scotsman," Robert quipped."
Author: Emery Lee

6. "In the alchemy of man's soul almost all noble attributes--courage, honor, love, hope, faith, duty, loyalty, etc.--can be transmuted into ruthlessness. Compassion alone stands apart from the continuous traffic between good and evil proceeding within us. Compassion is the antitoxin of the soul: where there is compassion even the most poisonous impulses remain relatively harmless.Nature has no compassion. It is, in the words of William Blake, "a creation that groans, living on the death; where fish and bird and beast and tree and metal and stone live by devouring." Nature accepts no excuses and the only punishment it knows is death."
Author: Eric Hoffer

7. "To burn with desire and keep quiet about it is the greatest punishment we can bring on ourselves."
Author: Federico García Lorca

8. "Misbehavior and punishment are not opposites that cancel each other - on the contrary they breed and reinforce each other."
Author: Haim G. Ginott

9. "Going to the opera, like getting drunk, is a sin that carries its own punishment with it."
Author: Hannah More

10. "Well Joe, the truth is that you're not a bad guy, but you have been a bit mysogynistic and homophobic. So your punishment is to make you walk the earth as a homosexual ghost buggering your old mates and aquaitances."
Author: Irvine Welsh

11. "An absolutely necessary part of a writer's equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself."
Author: Irwin Shaw

12. "Lina had never seen anyone so disorganized as the doctor. She peeked into the medicine room once when the doctor was out and was amazed at the clutter in there-shelves and cupboards and tables piled with stuff in bottles and stuff in boxes and stuff in jars, all higgledy-piggledy. How Dr. Hester found anything she couldn't imagine."
Author: Jeanne DuPrau

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

14. "Writing is so difficult that I often feel that writers, having had their hell on earth, will escape all punishment hereafter."
Author: Jessamyn West

15. "If we read the text alone, assuming that the word 'cross' can only derive its meaning from the later death of Jesus, then its appearance in the text must be an anachronism read back into the story after the crucifixion. This conclusion becomes unnecessary if the cross, being the standard punishment for insurrection or for the refusal to confess Caesar's lordship, already had a clear definition in the listener's awareness. 'Take up your cross' may even have been a standard phrase of Zealot recruiting. The disciple's cross is not a metaphor for self-mortification or even generally innocent suffering; 'if you follow me, your fate will be like mine, the fate of a revolutionary. You cannot follow me without facing that fate."
Author: John Howard Yoder

16. "Dan suggested to Owen and me that we were better off to not involve ourselves with Hester. How true! But how we wanted to be involved in the thrilling real-life sleaziness that we suspected Hester was in the thick-of. We were in a phase, through television and the movies, of living only vicariously. Even faintly sordid silliness excited us if it put us in contact with love."
Author: John Irving

17. "Well, there's no one at all, they do be saying, but is deserving of some punishment from the very minute of his birth."
Author: Lady Gregory

18. "I lay in bed that night, a first-time drunkard at seven years of age, pondering the punishment I knew would arrive on callused palms. In the forest, as if sensing my plight, wolves howled nocturnal laments. The magnificent lunar lullabies of my lupine brethren wooed me into a deep and cleansing sleep."
Author: Mark Rice

19. "A woman never overcomes these problems by any exercise of thought. They are not to be solved, or only in one way. If her heart chance to come uppermost, they vanish. Thus Hester Prynne, whose heart had lost its regular and healthy throb, wandered without a clue in the dark labyrinth of mind; now turned aside by an insurmountable precipice; now starting back from a deep chasm. There was wild and ghastly scenery all around her, and a home and comfort nowhere."
Author: Nathaniel Hawthorne

20. "Capital punishment is our society's recognition of the sanctity of human life."
Author: Orrin Hatch

21. "Everything was a test. Or a lesson. Or a punishment from which he was supposed to learn a lesson, on which he would be tested later, and punished if he hadn't learned it."
Author: Orson Scott Card

22. "The event caused a certain amount of ribaldry and a fair number of sentences depriving men of their grog for playing the God-damned fool, an offense that came under Article Thirty-six 'All other crimes not capital, committed by any person or persons in the fleet, which are not mentioned in this act, or for which no punishment is hereby directed to be inflicted, shall be punished according to the laws and customs in such cases used at sea,' also known as the captain's cloak or cover-all."
Author: Patrick O'Brian

23. "So, that sucked," I said, trying to sound as jovial as possible. "Side effect of dating in the magical world, I guess."He made a sound of amusement, his shoulders jerking slightly. But he still didn't look at me. "You think those guys ever had these kinds of problems?" he asked, nodding toward the picture. It was the one depicting the very first class at Hecate Hall, back in 1903. There had only been a few students that year, back when the school hadn't been used for punishment but as a kind of safe house."Probably," I said. "That chick in the straw hat seems kind of skanky."
Author: Rachel Hawkins

24. "The name says it all. That's where Dad (Hades) tries out his new punishment ideas, but he says the traditional ones still work best: the lava flows, the minefields full of exploding surprises, burning at the stake, running naked through cactus patches... You name it, we've got it here - Nico di Angelo"
Author: Rick Riordan

25. "Arendt, as we have seen, is committed to understanding totalitarianism in its complete novelty, as an unprecedented phenomenon. It is unprecedented in the strict sense that it does not just represent a novel variation with respect to the categories defining forms of government that we have long held… historically, mankind ‘even in its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remembered, as a self-evident acknowledgment of the fact that we are all men' (Arendt 1968a: 452). What was attempted in the camps was neither punishment nor persecution but obliteration, such that even death was robbed of its meaning, ‘making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible."
Author: Steve Buckler

26. "She wonders if it could really have been as simple for him, this changing of worlds, as the purchase of a ticket. Hester tries to imagine going back, reversing the flow of so much water. She feels like a thread that has been pulled to the ends of the earth, unraveling everything behind it. What is one to make of it now? Ahead or behind, there is no clear pattern."
Author: Tanya Moir

27. "The swarms of cringers, suckers, doughfaces, lice of politics, planners of sly involutions for their own preferment to city offices or state legislatures or the judiciary or congress or the presidency, obtain a response of love and natural deference from the people whether they get the offices or no . . . . when it is better to be a bound booby and rogue in office at a high salary than the poorest free mechanic or farmer with his hat unmoved from his head and firm eyes and a candid and generous heart . . . . and when servility by town or state or the federal government or any oppression on a large scale or small scale can be tried on without its own punishment following duly after in exact proportion against the smallest chance of escape . . . . or rather when all life and all the souls of men and women are discharged from any part of the earth—then only shall the instinct of liberty be discharged from that part of the earth."
Author: Walt Whitman

28. "By the fulfillment of my legal and moral duty I think I have earned punishment just as little as the tens of thousands of dutiful German officials who have now been imprisoned only because they carried out their duties."
Author: Wilhelm Frick

Hester Prynne Punishment Quotes Pictures