Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.
It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.
Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
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.
Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.
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.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.
When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
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.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
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.
Crimes generally punish themselves.
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.
