Quotes

We shall fight against them, throw them in prisons and destroy them.

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

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.

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

The contagion of crime is like that of the plague. Criminals collected together corrupt each other; they are worse than ever when at the termination of their punishment they re-enter society.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

I can tell you this on a stack of Bibles: prisons are archaic, brutal, unregenerative, overcrowded hell holes where the inmates are treated like animals with absolutely not one humane thought given to what they are going to do once they are released. You're an animal in a cage and you're treated like one.

The perfection of a thing consists in its essence; there are perfect criminals, as there are men of perfect probity.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

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

If it's near dinner-time, the foreman takes out his watch when the jury has retired, and says: "Dear me, gentlemen, ten minutes to five, I declare! I dine at five, gentlemen." "So do I," says everybody else, except two men who ought to have dined at three and seem more than half disposed to stand out in consequence. The foreman smiles, and puts up his watch:--"Well, gentlemen, what do we say, plaintiff or defendant, gentlemen?

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

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