No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
One crime is everything; two nothing.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
The severest justice may not always be the best policy.
What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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?
Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.
Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”
Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.
Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.
I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.
Justice renders to every one his due.
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.
I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.
We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.
We are prisoners of ideas.
The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
