Quotes

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

Written laws are like spiders' webs, and will, like them, only entangle and hold the poor and weak, while the rich and powerful will easily break through them.

It is more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.

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

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

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

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.

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.

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

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

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

If you strike at, imprison, or kill us, out of our prisons or graves we will still evoke a spirit that will thwart you, and perhaps, raise a force that will destroy you! We defy you! Do your worst!

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

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.