Quotes

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

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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.

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

I have never been contained except I made the 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.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

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

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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

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.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

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.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.