Quotes

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

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

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?

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

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

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.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Man is condemned to be free.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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

He who profits by a crime commits it.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

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

No crime has been without a precedent.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.