What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.
One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.
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.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.
To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
No man should be judge in his own case.
As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.
We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.
A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.
There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
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.
