Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
No man should be judge in his own case.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.
A sick person is a prisoner.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
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.
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.
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.
The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.
Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.
No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
