Quotes

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

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

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

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

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

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

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

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

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

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.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

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.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

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.

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