Quotes

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

Justice renders to every one his due.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

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 am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

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.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

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.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.