In jail a man has no personality. He is a minor disposal problem and a few entries on reports. Nobody cares who loves or hates him..., what he looks like, what he did with his life. Nobody reacts to him unless he gives trouble. Nobody abuses him. All that is asked of him is that he go quietly to the right cell and remain quiet when he gets there. There is nothing to fight against, nothing to be mad at. The jailers are quiet men without animosity or sadism. All this stuff you read about men yelling and screaming, beating against the bars, running spoons along them, guards rushing in with clubs--all that is for the big house. A good jail is one of the quietest places in the world.... Life in jail is in suspension.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The temples, the tank, the jail, the palace, the birds, the carrion, the Guest House, that came into view as they issued from the ...gap and saw Mau beneath: they didn't want it, they said in their hundred voices, "No, not yet," and the sky said, "No, not there."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Ransom Stoddard: I don't wanna gun. I don't wanna gun. I don't wanna kill 'em. I wanna put 'em in jail. Tom Donophon: Well, I... know those law books mean a lot to you. But not out here. Out here a man settles his own problems. Ransom Stoddard: No. Do, do you know what you're saying to me? D'you know? You're saying exactly what Liberty Valance said. What kind of community have I come to. You all seem to know about this fellow Liberty Valance. He's a no-good, gun-packing murdering thief. But the only advice you can give to me is to carry a gun. Well, I'm a lawyer. Ransom Stoddard, attorney at law. And the law is the only, the only.... [he collapses]LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
So we took leave of Cape Cod and its inhabitants. We liked the manners of the last, what little we saw of them, very much. They we...re particularly downright and good-humored. The old people appeared remarkably well preserved, as if by the saltness of the atmosphere, and after having once mistaken, we could never be certain whether we were talking to a coeval of our grandparents, or to one of our own age. They are said to be more purely the descendants of the Pilgrims than the inhabitants of any other part of the State. We were told that "sometimes, when the court comes together at Barnstable, they have not a single criminal to try, and the jail is shut up." It was "to let" when we were there. Until quite recently there was no regular lawyer below Orleans. Who, then, will complain of a few regular man-eating sharks along the Back Side?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The night in prison was novel and interesting enough.... I found that even here there was a history and a gossip which never circu...lated beyond the walls of the jail. Probably this is the only house in the town where verses are composed, which are afterward printed in a circular form, but not published. I was shown quite a long list of verses which were composed by some young men who had been detected in an attempt to escape, who avenged themselves by singing them.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
As we thus swept along, our Indian repeated in a deliberate and drawling tone the words "Daniel Webster, great lawyer," apparently... reminded of him by the name of the stream, and he described his calling on him once in Boston, at what he supposed was his boarding-house. He had no business with him, but merely went to pay his respects, as we should say. In answer to our questions, he described his person well enough. It was on the day after Webster delivered his Bunker Hill oration, which I believe Polis heard. The first time he called he waited till he was tired without seeing him, and then went away. The next time, he saw him go by the door of the room in which he was waiting several times, in his shirt-sleeves, without noticing him. He thought that if he had come to see Indians, they would not have treated him so. At length, after very long delay, he came in, walked toward him, and asked in a loud voice, gruffly, "What do you want?" and he, thinking at first, by the motion of his hand, that he was going to strike him, said to himself, "You'd better take care; if you try that I shall know what to do." He did not like him, and declared that all he said "was not worth talk about a musquash." We suggested that probably Mr. Webster was very busy, and had a great many visitors just then.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Under the one word "house" are included the schoolhouse, the almshouse, the jail, the tavern, the dwellinghouse; and the meanest s...hed or cave in which men live contains elements of all these. But nowhere on the earth stands the entire and perfect house.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
One afternoon, near the end of the first summer, when I went to the village to get a shoe from the cobbler's, I was seized and put... into jail, because, as I have elsewhere related, I did not pay a tax to, or recognize the authority of, the State which buys and sells men, women, and children, like cattle, at the door of its senate-house. I had gone down to the woods for other purposes. But, wherever a man goes, men will pursue and paw him with their dirty institutions, and, if they can, constrain him to belong to their desperate odd-fellow society. It is true, I might have resisted forcibly with more or less effect, might have run "amok" against society; but I preferred that society should run "amok" against me, it being the desperate party. However, I was released the next day, obtained my mended shoe, and returned to the woods in season to get my dinner of huckleberries on Fair Haven Hill.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
[The Settlement House] must be grounded in a philosophy whose foundation is on the solidarity of the human race, a philosophy whic...h will not waver when the race happens to be represented by a drunken woman or an idiot boy.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The women who take husbands not out of love but out of greed, to get their bills paid, to get a fine house and clothes and jewels;... the women who marry to get out of a tiresome job, or to get away from disagreeable relatives, or to avoid being called an old maid--these are whores in everything but name. The only difference between them and my girls is that my girls gave a man his money's worth.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »