Quotes

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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

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

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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

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

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

One crime is everything; two nothing.

On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.

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.

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

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.

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.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.