Quotes

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

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.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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.

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.

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.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

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?

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.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

We are prisoners of ideas.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

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

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.