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.
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.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
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 refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
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.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
