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What?' He cried, darting at him a look of fury: 'Dare you still implore the Eternal's mercy? Would you feign penitence, and again act an Hypocrite's part? Villain, resign your hopes of pardon. Thus I secure my prey!'As He said this, darting his talons into the Monk's shaven crown, He sprang with him from the rock. The Caves and mountains rang with Ambrosio's shrieks. The Daemon continued to soar aloft, till reaching a dreadful height, He released the sufferer. Headlong fell the Monk through the airy waste; The sharp point of a rock received him; and He rolled from precipice to precipice, till bruised and mangled He rested on the river's banks. Life still existed in his miserable frame: He attempted in vain to raise himself; His broken and dislocated limbs refused to perform their office, nor was He able to quit the spot where He had first fallen. The Sun now rose above the horizon; Its scorching beams darted full upon the head of the expiring Sinner. Myriads of insects were called forth by the warmth; They drank the blood which trickled from Ambrosio's wounds; He had no power to drive them from him, and they fastened upon his sores, darted their stings into his body, covered him with their multitudes, and inflicted on him tortures the most exquisite and insupportable. The Eagles of the rock tore his flesh piecemeal, and dug out his eyeballs with their crooked beaks. A burning thirst tormented him; He heard the river's murmur as it rolled beside him, but strove in vain to drag himself towards the sound. Blind, maimed, helpless, and despairing, venting his rage in blasphemy and curses, execrating his existence, yet dreading the arrival of death destined to yield him up to greater torments, six miserable days did the Villain languish. On the Seventh a violent storm arose: The winds in fury rent up rocks and forests: The sky was now black with clouds, now sheeted with fire: The rain fell in torrents; It swelled the stream; The waves overflowed their banks; They reached the spot where Ambrosio lay, and when they abated carried with them into the river the Corse of the despairing Monk.

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I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture. It is a cruel and useless substitute for the elimination of those conditions--poverty, unemployment, homelessness, desperation, racism, greed--which are at the root of most punished crime. The crimes of the rich and powerful go mostly unpunished.It must surely be a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit that even a small number of those men and women in the hell of the prison system survive it and hold on to their humanity.

HZ
Howard Zinn

You Can't Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A Personal History of Our Times

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today we read of Don Quixote with a bitter taste in the mouth, it isalmost an ordeal, which would make us seem very strange and incomprehensibleto the author and his contemporaries, _ they read it with a clearconscience as the funniest of books, it made them nearly laugh themselvesto death).To see suffering does you good, to make suffer, better still _ thatOn the Genealogy of Morality4248 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 153_4.49 See below, Supplementary material, pp. 137_9, pp. 140_1, pp. 143_4.50 Don Quixote, Book II, chs 31_7.is a hard proposition, but an ancient, powerful, human-all-too-humanproposition to which, by the way, even the apes might subscribe: as peoplesay, in thinking up bizarre cruelties they anticipate and, as it were, act outa __emonstration_ of what man will do. No cruelty, no feast: that is whatthe oldest and longest period in human history teaches us _ and punishment,too, has such very strong festive aspects! _

FN
Friedrich Nietzsche

On the Genealogy of Morals/Ecce Homo