If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.
One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
Justice renders to every one his due.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
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.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
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 existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.
