Quotes

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

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.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

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

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.

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

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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

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!

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.

Punishment, that is the justice for the unjust.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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.

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.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.