Quotes

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

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

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

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

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.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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!

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

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

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.