Quotes

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

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Before we can diminish our sufferings from the ill-controlled aggressive assaults of fellow citizens, we must renounce the philosophy of punishment, the obsolete, vengeful penal attitude. In its place we would seek a comprehensive, constructive social attitude - therapeutic in some instances, restraining in some instances, but preventive in its total social impact. In the last analysis this becomes a question of personal morals and values. No matter how glorified or how piously disguised, vengeance as a human motive must be personally repudiated by each and every one of us.

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.

In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him, what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Virtue pardons the wicked, as the sandal-tree perfumes the axe which strikes it.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

You utter a vow, or forge a signature, and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman, or prison.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

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

Let us remember that justice must be observed even to the lowest.

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.

Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future lives and crimes to society.

Women have worked hard; starved in prison; given of their time and lives that we might sit in the House of Commons and take part in the legislating of this country.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem upon another.

I know how men in exile feed on dreams of hope.

The best situation of all, and one frequently utilized, is for jails and prisons to allow volunteer ministers of all faiths to enter prisons and offer their services to the inmates who want them. That way, the religious needs of inmates are met but without government funds being spent.

Nor cell, nor chain, nor dungeon speaks to the murderer like the voice of solitude.

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.

It is safer that a bad man should not be accused, than that he should be acquitted.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

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

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.