Quotes

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.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

Governments have tried to stop crime through punishment throughout the ages, but crime continued in the past punishment remains. Crime can only be stopped through a preventive approach in the schools. You teach the students Transcendental Meditation, and right away they’ll begin using their full brain physiology sensible and they will not get sidetracked into wrong things.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

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

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

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

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

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.

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

A country is in a bad state, which is governed only by laws; because a thousand things occur for which laws cannot provide, and where authority ought to interpose.

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.

Crime succeeds by sudden despatch; honest counsels gain vigor by delay.