Quotes

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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.

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.

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.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

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

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

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

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

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.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

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

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!