“…………………There are people who, like tigers, thirst for blood. Any man who has once tasted this dominion, this unlimited power, over the body, blood and spirit of a human creature like himself, subject like himself to the law of Christ, any man who has tasted this power, this boundless opportunity to humiliate with the deepest degradation another being made in the image of God, becomes despite himself the servant instead of the master of his own emotions. Tyranny is a habit; it has the capacity to develop and it does develop, in the end, into a disease. I maintain that the best of men may become coarsened and degraded, by force of habit, to the level of a beast.

Blood and power are intoxicants; callousness and perversity develop and grow; the greatest perversions become acceptable and finally sweet to the mind and heart. The man and the citizen perish eternally in the tyrant, and a return to human dignity, to remorse and regeneration, becomes almost completely impossible to him. Besides, this example and the possibility of such power act like a contagion on the whole of society; such despotism is a temptation.

A society which contemplates such manifestations calmly is already corrupted at its roots. In short, the right given to one man to inflict corporal punishment on another is one of the ulcers of society, one of the most powerful agents of every germ and every budding attempt at civilization, the fundamental cause of its certain and irretrievable destruction. “

                                             Fyodor Dostoyesvsky

                                    Memoirs from the House of the Dead