Quotes

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.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

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

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

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.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

We are prisoners of ideas.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

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

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.”

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.