Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
On average, drug prisoners spend more time in federal prison than rapists, who often get out on early release because of the overcrowding in prison caused by the Drug War.
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.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
