Quotes

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.