Quotes

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.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

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.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

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

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

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

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

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.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

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

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

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

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.