Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
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.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
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.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.
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.
There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.
Shyness is the prison of the heart.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
There is a point at which even justice does injury.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.
He who opens a school door, closes a prison.
Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.
Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
No crime has been without a precedent.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
