Quotes

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

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

I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

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

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

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

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

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

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

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.

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

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

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

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

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.

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

Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.