Quotes

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

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.

It is certain that the study of human psychology, if it were undertaken exclusively in prisons, would also lead to misrepresentation and absurd generalizations.

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.”

The world itself is but a large prison, out of which some are daily led to execution.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

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.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

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.

If you share the crime of your friend, you make it your own.

When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.

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