Quotes

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

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.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

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.

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

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

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

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

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

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

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!

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

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

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

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

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

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.