Quotes

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

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

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Man is condemned to be free.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

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.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

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.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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

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.

The solution to our drug problem is not in incarceration.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

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.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.