Quotes

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

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.”

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

It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their own kind.

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.

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

He who profits by a crime commits it.

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.

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

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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?

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

We are prisoners of ideas.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

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

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