The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.
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 only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.
It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
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.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
