The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
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?
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
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.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
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.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
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.
