Quotes

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

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.

The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

No man should be judge in his own case.

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.

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

He who opens a school door, closes a prison.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

No crime has been without a precedent.

I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

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

The severest justice may not always be the best policy.

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

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

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

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

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 object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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