Quotes

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

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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.

Justice renders to every one his due.

A sick person is a prisoner.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

Man is condemned to be free.

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

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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?

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

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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.