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.
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.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
Vices are not crimes.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.
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.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
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.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
