CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
All scoundrelism is summed up in the phrase "Que Messieurs les Assassins commencent!"
The man who has graduated from the flogging block at Eton to the bench from which he sentences the garotter to be flogged is the same social product as the garotter who has been kicked by his father and cuffed by his mother until he has grown strong enough to throttle and rob the rich citizen whose money he desires.
Imprisonment is as irrevocable as death.
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
The assassin Czolgosz made President McKinley a hero by assassinating him. The United States of America made Czolgosz a hero by the same process.
Assassination on the scaffold is the worst form of assassination, because there it is invested with the approval of society.
It is the deed that teaches, not the name we give it. Murder and capital punishment are not opposites that cancel one another, but similars that breed their kind.
Crime is only the retail department of what, in wholesale, we call penal law.
When a man wants to murder a tiger he calls it sport: when the tiger wants to murder him he calls it ferocity. The distinction between Crime and Justice is no greater.
Whilst we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.
The most anxious man in a prison is the governor.
It is not necessary to replace a guillotined criminal: it is necessary to replace a guillotined social system.