Quotes

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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.

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

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.

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

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

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Man is condemned to be free.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

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.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

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

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

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.