Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
The English laws punish vice; the Chinese laws do more, they reward virtue.
There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.
I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
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.
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?
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.
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.
Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.
Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
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.
Society prepares the crime; the criminal commits it.
Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.
No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.
One crime has to be concealed by another.
Those magistrates who can prevent crime, and do not, in effect encourage it.
No man should be judge in his own case.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
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.”
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
There is no peace because the making of peace is at least as costly as the making of war - at least as exigent, at least as disruptive, at least as liable to bring disgrace and prison and death in its wake.
One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.
