Quotes

The punishment can be remitted; the crime is everlasting.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

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

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

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

They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!

To be at peace in crime! Ah, who can thus flatter himself.

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

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

A man who has no excuse for a crime, is indeed defenseless!

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.

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.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

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

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.

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

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.

Adversities such as being homeless and going to prison has made many people stronger.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

I was put into jail as I was going to the shoemaker's to get a shoe which was mended. When I was let out the next morning, I proceeded to finish my errand, and, having put on my mended shoe, joined a huckleberry party, who were impatient to put themselves under my conduct; and in half an hour -- for the horse was soon tackled -- was in the midst of a huckleberry field, on one of our highest hills, two miles off, and then the State was nowhere to be seen.

He was a first-time nonviolent possible offender, ... And under the mandatory minimums, he was put in prison for 15 years. Not only does the punishment not fit the crime, but the mandatory minimums don't give judges any discretion to look at the background of the case, to read into the specifics of the case. I don't know a judge who really is in favor of the mandatory minimums.