Quotes

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

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

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

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

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.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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.