Quotes

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

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

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.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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

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

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

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

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

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

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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