Quotes

Crime is a logical extension of the sort of behavior that often [is] considered perfectly respectable in legitimate business.

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

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

There is no greater punishment of wickedness that that it is dissatisfied with itself and its deeds.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

Man is condemned to be free.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Well, I don't think prisons are the answer to everything, obviously.

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.

It is true you cannot eat freedom and you cannot power machinery with democracy. But then neither can political prisoners turn on the light in the cells of a dictatorship.

I don't like being famous - it is like a prison. And driving for Ferrari would make it far worse.

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.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

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.

The common argument that crime is caused by poverty is a kind of slander on the poor.

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

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.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.