Quotes

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

Man is condemned to be free.

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?

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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

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.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

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

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.