Quotes

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

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

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

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

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

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

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

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

Women now have choices. They can be married, not married, have a job, not have a job, be married with children, unmarried with children. Men have the same choice we've always had: work, or prison.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

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

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

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

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.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.