Quotes

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.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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

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

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

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

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.

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

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

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

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.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.