Quotes

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

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

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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%.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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.

Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

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

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

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.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.