Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
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?
Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.
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.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
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.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.
~James Bell
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
A sick person is a prisoner.
