Quotes

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

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

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

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

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.