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.
Vices are not crimes.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
They're not supposed to show prison films in prison. Especially ones that are about escaping.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Wicked deeds are generally done, even with impunity, for the mere desire of occupation.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.
Fear can be like a prison. It is, however, a self made prison. Many are imprisoned by fear. No one else can liberate them from this prison. Others may inspire them but they must liberate themselves.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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?
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
