To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.
The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.
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.
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.
Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.
While crime is punished it yet increases.
Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.
The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.
We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.
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.
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?
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
Man is condemned to be free.
To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.
A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
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.
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.”
On a planet that increasingly resembles one huge Maximum Security prison, the only intelligent choice is to plan a jail break.
