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.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
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.
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.
Extreme justice is extreme injustice.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.
We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.
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.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
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.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
