Quotes

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.

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 never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

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

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

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Vices are not crimes.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.