Quotes

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

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

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

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

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

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Vices are not crimes.

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

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

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.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

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.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

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

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.