Quotes

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

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.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

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

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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 have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.