Quotes

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

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.

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

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.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

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.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Man is condemned to be free.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

Justice renders to every one his due.

No crime has been without a precedent.

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

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

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

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.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

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.