Quotes

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

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

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

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

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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

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.

Vices are not crimes.

We are prisoners of ideas.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

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.

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

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?

To try to raise a son from inside the prison walls is a very difficult thing. But I want to say to the world my son at 16 was the one who tried the most to get me out of prison.
~Jim Bakker

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.

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.

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

Crimes generally punish themselves.