Leo Tolstoy
Translated by
Dmitry Fadeyev
In Russian, to punish means to instruct. You can only instruct by example. Repaying evil with evil does not instruct, but corrupts.
Then Peter came and said to him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Until seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not tell you until seven times, but, until seventy times seven.”
— Matthew 18:21–22
If we allow the unthinkable, that a human being has the right to punish, then who is going to take this right upon themselves?
Only those who have fallen so low that they do not remember and do not know their own sins.
The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman taken in adultery. Having set her in the middle, they told him, “Teacher, we found this woman in adultery, in the very act. Now in our law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. What then do you say about her?” They said this testing him, that they might have something to accuse him of. But Jesus stooped down and wrote on the ground with his finger. But when they continued asking him, he looked up and said to them, “He who is without sin among you, let him throw the first stone at her.” Again he stooped down and wrote on the ground with his finger. They, when they heard it, being convicted by their conscience, went out one by one, beginning from the oldest, even to the last. Jesus was left alone with the woman where she was, in the middle. Jesus, standing up, saw her and said, “Woman, where are your accusers? Did no one condemn you?” She said, “No one, Lord.” Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way. From now on, sin no more.”
— John 8:3–11
Most of people’s miseries are caused by the fact that sinful people have assumed the right to punish. Vengeance is mine, I will repay.
If it seems to you that someone has wronged you—forget it and forgive them. And if you have never experienced this before, you will discover a new joy—to forgive.
The real punishment for every bad deed takes place in the soul of the offender and consists in a reduction of his capacity to use the goods of life. On the other hand, external punishment only provokes the offender.
Punishment is always cruelly-painful. If it was not cruelly-painful, it would not be prescribed. For the people of our time, imprisonment is just as cruelly-painful as flogging was a hundred years ago.
American Indians never submitted themselves to any laws, any coercive power, any shadow of government. Their only controls are their manners, and that moral sense of right and wrong, which, like the sense of tasting and feeling, in every man makes a part of his nature. An offense against these is punished by contempt, by exclusion from society, or, where the case is serious, as that of murder, by the individuals whom it concerns. Imperfect as this species of coercion may seem, crimes are very rare among them: insomuch that were it made a question, whether no law, as among the savage Americans, or too much law, as among the civilized Europeans, submits man to the greatest evil, one who has seen both conditions of existence would pronounce it to be the last: and that the sheep are happier of themselves, than under care of the wolves.
— Jefferson
The existence of a science of punishment, i.e. the commitment of the most grossly ignorant act, which is natural only to a human being on the lowest stage of his development—a child or a savage—is the clearest proof of how often the word “science” implies not only the most insignificant but also the most harmful teachings.