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.”
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.
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.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
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.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
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.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
Vices are not crimes.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
