Quotes

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

No crime has been without a precedent.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

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.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

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

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

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

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

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

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

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.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.