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.
It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.
What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
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.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.
The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.
A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.
Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.
There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.
