The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
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.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.
No crime has been without a precedent.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
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 object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
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 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.
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.
Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.
He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
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.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
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.
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.
