Quotes

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

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

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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.

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

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

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

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

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

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

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

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

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

No man should be judge in his own case.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.