The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
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.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.
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.
If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!
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.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.
Most people fancy themselves innocent of those crimes of which they cannot be convicted.
When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.
We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.
In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.
Vices are not crimes.
To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.
I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
