Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
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.
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?
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
We are prisoners of ideas.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
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.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
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.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
