Quotes

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

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

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

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

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

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

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

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

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

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

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.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

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.

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

I have never been contained except I made the prison.