Quotes

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

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.

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

Body is a home, a prison and a grave.

It is hard, but it is excellent, to find the right knowledge of when correction is necessary and when grace doth most avail.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

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.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.

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 more dangerous that even a guilty person should be punished without the forms of law than that he should escape.

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

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.

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

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

There are only two places in the world where time takes precedence over the job to be done. School and prison.

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.

No man survives when freedom fails. The best men rot in filthy jails, and those who cry 'appease, appease' are hanged by those they tried to please.

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 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 did not for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar.

Crimes generally punish themselves.

I just remember that disturbing feeling of walking into that prison, the complete loss of privacy, the complete loss of stimulation, dignity.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

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