I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
A sick person is a prisoner.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
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!
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
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?
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
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.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
I have never been contained except I made the prison.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
