Quotes

Justice renders to every one his due.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

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

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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.

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.

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.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.

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.

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

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

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

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

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

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.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.