Quotes

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

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.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

We judge ourselves by what we feel capable of doing, while others judge us by what we have already done.

Trial by jury itself, instead of being a security to persons who are accused, shall be a delusion, a mockery, and a snare.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

Concepts of justice must have hands and feet to carry out justice in every case in the shortest possible time and the lowest possible cost. That is the challenge to every lawyer and judge in America.

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

Hanging was the worst use a man could be put to.

The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

I never saw a man who looked With such a wistful eye Upon that little tent of blue Which prisoners call the sky.

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.

The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

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

Steal goods and you’ll go to prison, steal lands and you are a king.

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

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

We shall not yield to violence. We shall not be deprived of union freedoms. We shall never agree with sending people to prison for their convictions.

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.

Faults of the head are punished in this world, those of the heart in another; but as most of our vices are compound, so also is their punishment.

To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.