Quotes

It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.

The power of punishment is to silence, not to confute.

Taught from infancy that beauty is woman's sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

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.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

In the halls of justice, the only justice is in the halls.

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.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

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

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.

Pardon is the virtue of victory.

No written law has been more binding than unwritten custom supported by popular opinion.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.

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.

Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.

I existed in a world that never is - the prison of the mind.

The torment of human frustration, whatever its immediate cause, is the knowledge that the self is in prison, its vital force and 'mangled mind' leaking away in lonely, wasteful self-conflict.

In my country we go to prison first and then become President.

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

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.