Quotes

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.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

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 refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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.

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.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

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.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

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

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Vices are not crimes.

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

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.