Quotes

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

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

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

A sick person is a prisoner.

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

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.

I never told a victim story about my imprisonment. Instead, I told a transformation story - about how prison changed my outlook, about how I saw that communication, truth, and trust are at the heart of power.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.

To be in prison so long, it's difficult to remember exactly what you did to get there.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

As we grow in wisdom, we pardon more freely.

They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

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

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

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.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

One crime is everything; two nothing.

Prosecution I have managed to avoid; but I have been arrested, charged in a police court, have refused to be bound over, and thereupon have been unconditionally released - to my great regret; for I have always wanted to know what going to prison was like.