Quotes

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!

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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

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.

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.