No crime has been without a precedent.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.
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.
Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.
Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.
Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.
In prison, you get the chance to see who really loves you.
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.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.
Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.
I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.
The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.
Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.
You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
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.
Nor stony tower, nor walls of beaten brass, Nor airless dungeon, nor strong links of iron, Can be retentive to the strength of spirit; But life, being weary of these worldly bars, Never lacks power to dismiss itself.
I was in prison, and you came unto me. Verily I say unto you, inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
~(Jesus Christ) Matthew 25:36, 40
He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.
I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.
