Quotes

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.

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

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

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

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

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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?

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

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

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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

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.

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.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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

Vices are not crimes.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.