Quotes

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

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.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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

While crime is punished it yet increases.

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

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

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

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.