Quotes

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

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.

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

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

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

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

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

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