Quotes

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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

They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

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.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

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

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.

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

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

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.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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

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

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

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

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

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

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.

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

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

Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.