Quotes

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

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.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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.

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%.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

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

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

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

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

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

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.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

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

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

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

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.