Quotes

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

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

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

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

Justice renders to every one his due.