Quotes

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

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

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

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.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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

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

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

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

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

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.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

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

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

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

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.