Quotes

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

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

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

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

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

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

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

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

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

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!

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

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

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

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

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

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

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.