Quotes

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

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.

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.

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

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

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.

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

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.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

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.

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.