Quotes

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

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

No crime has been without a precedent.

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

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

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

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

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.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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

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.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

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.

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.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

Man is condemned to be free.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

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

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

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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