Quotes

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.

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.

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

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Justice is that virtue of the soul which is distributive according to desert.

Once we are destined to live out our lives in the prison of our mind, our duty is to furnish it well.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

We are prisoners of ideas.

A just chastisement may benefit a man, though it seldom does; but an unjust one changes all his blood to gall.

There are few better measures of the concern a society has for its individual members and its own well being than the way it handles criminals.

Extreme justice is extreme injustice.

Whatever is worthy to be loved for anything is worthy of preservation. A wise and dispassionate legislator, if any such should ever arise among men, will not condemn to death him who has done or is likely to do more service than injury to society. Blocks and gibbets are the nearest objects with legislators, and their business is never with hopes or with virtues.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

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.

Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.

I have been studying how I may compare this prison where I live unto the world; Shut up in the prison of their own consciences.

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.

No crime has been without a precedent.