Quotes

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

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

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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

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.