Parenting & Family Quote by Georg C. Lichtenberg

Punishment, Lichtenberg suggests, often isn’t justice so much as tantrum dressed up as law. The image is brutal: “breaking” a murderer “on the wheel” (a real European execution method designed for spectacle) is set beside something almost comic - a child striking the chair that hurt it. The wit is surgical. By shrinking the state’s righteous fury to a toddler’s misdirected retaliation, he punctures the moral seriousness that authorities like to drape over public cruelty.

The specific intent isn’t to sentimentalize murderers; it’s to interrogate motive. Do we punish to protect society, to deter future violence, to affirm a moral order? Or do we punish because we’re angry and want to make pain answer pain? The chair analogy matters because it exposes a category error: the chair has no intention; it doesn’t “deserve” retribution. Lichtenberg nudges us to see how easily the condemned body becomes a stand-in for our hurt and fear, a target onto which we project cosmic balance.

Context sharpens the edge. Lichtenberg is an Enlightenment-era skeptic with a scientist’s allergy to untested assumptions. In a world where the state still staged punishment as theater, he treats vengeance as a primitive impulse that survives inside “civilized” institutions. The subtext is a warning about power: when punishment becomes performance, it trains citizens to confuse moral clarity with the pleasure of seeing someone suffer. The line lands because it makes that pleasure look small, childish - and therefore hard to defend without admitting what it really is.