Quotes

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

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

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

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

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

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.”

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

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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

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.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

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

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

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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

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.

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.