Quotes

No crime has been without a precedent.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

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.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.