Quotes

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

Prisons don't rehabilitate, they don't punish, they don't protect, so what the hell do they do?

The worst of prison life, he thought, was not being able to close his door.

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.

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.

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

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

Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.

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.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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.”

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.

So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you’re fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking…is freedom.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

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

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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.