Quotes

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

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

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

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.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

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

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.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

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

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

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.