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.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
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!
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.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
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.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
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.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
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.