Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
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.
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.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
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.
No crime has been without a precedent.
The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.
If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?
I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.
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.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.
The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.
It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.
