Quotes

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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

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

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

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

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.

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

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

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.