Quotes

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

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

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

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.

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

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

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

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.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

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

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

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.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

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

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