Quotes

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

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

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

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.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

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

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

A sick person is a prisoner.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

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

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

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

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.