One crime is everything; two nothing.
Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.
Nothing can be more abhorrent to democracy than to imprison a person or keep him in prison because he is unpopular. This is really the test of civilization.
He who profits by a crime commits it.
The only difference between me and my fellow actors is that I've spent more time in jail.
It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.
Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.
We don't seem to be able to check crime, so why not legalize it and then tax it out of business.
Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.
Crimes lead one into another; they who are capable of being forgers are capable of being incendiaries.
Justice renders to every one his due.
The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.
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.
Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.
No crime has been without a precedent.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.
Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.
Pardon is the virtue of victory.
