Quotes

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

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

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

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.

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 guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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

We are prisoners of ideas.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

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

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

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 only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.