Quotes

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

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.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

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.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

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.

The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.