Quotes

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

No man should be judge in his own case.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

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.

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

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

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

I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40

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

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.

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.

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

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

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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

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

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.