Capital punishment kills immediately, whereas lifetime imprisonment does so slowly. Which executioner is more humane? The one who ...kills you in a few minutes, or the one who wrests your life from you in the course of many years?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigor; but they grope ever upwards towards consciousness; the trees are i...mperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... imprisonment itself, entailing loss of liberty, loss of citizenship, separation from family and loved ones, is punishment enou...gh for most individuals, no matter how favorable the circumstances under which the time is passed.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
... throughout the ages down to modern times, conditions of imprisonment, what with overcrowding, idleness, and all their attendan...t evils, have been such that not only the person but also to a deplorable extent the personality has been "confined or restrained." The problem of the betterment of our physical prison conditions goes hand in hand ... with the problem of re-creating and releasing personality "deep-dungeoned in self," of giving scope to the forces that tend upward, of counteracting and rendering harmless the already dominant tendencies toward evil.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Monasticism, as it existed in Spain and still exists in Tibet, is a wasting disease of civilization. It puts a stop to life. Quite... simply, it depopulates. Claustration is castration. It has been the scourge of Europe. Add to this the violence so often inflicted on the conscience, the enforced vocations ... the closed mouths and minds, so much intelligence condemned to the imprisonment of vows for life, the burial of living souls. No matter who you are, the thought of so much suffering and degradation must cause you to shudder at the sight of a veil or cassock, those two shrouds of human invention.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One who breaks an unjust law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order t...o arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The case of Andrews is really a very bad one, as appears by the record already before me. Yet before receiving this I had ordered ...his punishment commuted to imprisonment ... and had so telegraphed. I did this, not on any merit in the case, but because I am trying to evade the butchering business lately.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The years of imprisonment hardened me.... Perhaps if you have been given a moment to hold back and wait for the next blow, your em...otions wouldn't be blunted as they have been in my case. When it happens every day of your life, when that pain becomes a way of life, I no longer have the emotion of fear. ... there is no longer anything I can fear. There is nothing the government has not done to me. There isn't any pain I haven't known.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;... This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbèd ice; To be imprisoned in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling--'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathèd worldly life That age, ache, penury, and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »