Quotes

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

A sick person is a prisoner.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of 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.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

No crime has been without a precedent.

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.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.