Quotes

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.

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

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

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

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

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

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.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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.

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

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

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

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.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.