Quotes

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

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

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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.

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

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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.

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

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.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.