Quotes

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

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

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

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

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

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

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

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

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.

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

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

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

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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