Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
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.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.
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 am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Body is a home, a prison and a grave.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
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.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
