Quotes

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

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.

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 pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

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

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.

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

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

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

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

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.