Quotes

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

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.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

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

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.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

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

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

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

No man should be judge in his own case.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

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

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

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

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.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.