Quotes

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

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.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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

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

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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

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

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

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

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

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

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.