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.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
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.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.
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 obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
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.
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.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
