“Good and evil, reward and punishment, are the only motives to a rational creature: these are the spur and reins whereby all mankind are set on work, and guided”
John Locke
“If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.”
Albert Einstein
“I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil.”
“A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.”
Oscar Wilde
“One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”
“I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation [and] is but a reflection of human frailty.”
“The liar's punishment is not in the least that he is not believed, but that he cannot believe anyone else.”
George Bernard Shaw
