Quotes

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

We are prisoners of ideas.

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

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

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.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

A sick person is a prisoner.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

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

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

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

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

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.