Quotes

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.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

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.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

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.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

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

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

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.