Quotes

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

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.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

No man should be judge in his own case.

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.

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

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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

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.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.