Quotes

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

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

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.

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

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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

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

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

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

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.