Quotes

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

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

Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.

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. I did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

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

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

A sick person is a prisoner.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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.

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

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

The public have more interest in the punishment of an injury than he who receives it.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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.

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.