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.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
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?
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
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.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
No man should be judge in his own case.
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
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.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
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.
I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
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.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
