Quotes

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

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

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.