No crime has been without a precedent.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
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 public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
