Quotes

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

The thoughts of a prisoner - they're not free either. They keep returning to the same things.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

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.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

Man is condemned to be free.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

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.

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.