Quotes

No crime has been without a precedent.

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.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

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

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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.

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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.

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.

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

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.