Quotes

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

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

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.

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.

Fast closed with double grills
And triple gates – the cell
To wicked souls is hell;
But to a mind that's innocent
'Tis only iron, wood and stone.

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

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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.

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

Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

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.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.