Pope Benedict XVI Quotes

Today we have to learn all over again that love for the sinner and love for the person who has been harmed are correctly balanced if I punish the sinner in the form that is possible and appropriate.

Justice should not admit a public's thirst for pure revenge.

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

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

In 'Maatr,' we do not justify taking the law into our hands. That's not the right thing to do. We are not promoting that.

Compassion to an offender who has grossly violated the laws is, in effect, a cruelty to the peaceable subject who has observed them.

Forgiveness is not substitute for justice.

Forgiveness is spiritual. Punishment is legal," Leo says. "They're not mutually exclusive.

Justice without force is powerless; force without justice is tyrannical.

Justice that love gives is a surrender, justice that law gives is a punishment.

To show men that crimes can be pardoned, and that punishment is not their inevitable consequence, encourages the illusion of impunity and induces the belief that, since there are pardons, those sentences which are not pardoned are violent acts of force rather than the products of justice.

Unless we provide consequences for activities and actions that are wrong, we are not going to get any truth.

Justice is the truth in action.

Only the man who has enough good in him to feel the justice of the penalty can be punished.

I don't believe in vengeance. Really, when all is said and done, I probably don't believe in punishment.

As a lawyer, as a private citizen, you see a lot of injustice. You see a lot of people who should have been punished and are not, and people who were punished wrongfully are not vindicated. Fiction is sort of a way to set the record straight, and let people at least believe that justice can be achieved and the right outcomes can occur.

Justice is a terrible but necessary thing.

Punishment should have a redemptive quality to it.

If crimes have been committed it is necessary to investigate. They say that the number of victims have been exaggerated, but one case is enough. Cain slew Abel only once. Christ only once was crucified.

The magistrate has the right to enforce what he thinks, and he who is conscious of the truth has a right to suffer.

The injury done to a man ought to be such that vengeance cannot be feared.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Justice may be slow, but it does grind inexorably.

Every punishment is based, not on logic or the feeling of justice, but on the desire to wish evil on those who have done evil to you or to another person…. Everything about our present system of punishments and about all criminal law will be thought of by future generations in the same way that we think of cannibalism or human sacrifice to the pagan gods. “How did they not see the uselessness and cruelty of those things which they did?” our descendants will say about us.

The superior man governs men, according to their nature, with what is proper to them, and as soon as they change what is wrong, he stops.