Quotes

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

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.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

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.

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

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

No crime has been without a precedent.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.