I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up...I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.
I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice.
The law does not pretend to punish everything that is dishonest. That would seriously interfere with business.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear.
No crime has been without a precedent.
It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.
No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.
History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.
Money will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man.
And while God had work for Paul, he found him friends both in court and prison. Let persecutors send saints to prison, God can provide a keeper for their turn.
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
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.
Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.
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.
Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.
I am an expert of electricity. My father occupied the chair of applied electricity at the state prison.
Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
Organized crime in America takes in over forty billion dollars a year. This is quite a profitable sum, especially when one considers that the Mafia spends very little for office supplies.
