Quotes

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

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

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.

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 who profits by a crime commits it.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

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

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.

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.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

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.

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

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

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

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

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

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.