Quotes

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

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

Justice renders to every one his due.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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

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

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.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

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.

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

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.