Quotes

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.

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

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

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

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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.

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.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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

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.

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

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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.

Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

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