Quotes

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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.

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

Vices are not crimes.

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

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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

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.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.