They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
No crime has been without a precedent.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
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.
I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives 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.
