Quotes

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

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

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.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

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

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

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

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

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.

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.

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

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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

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