Crimes were committed to punish crimes, and crimes were committed to prevent crimes. The world has been filled with prisons and dungeons, with chains and whips, with crosses and gibbets, with thumbscrews and racks, with hangmen and heads-men — and yet these frightful means and instrumentalities have committed far more crimes than they have prevented.... Ignorance, filth, and poverty are the missionaries of crime. As long as dishonorable success outranks honest effort — as long as society bows and cringes before the great thieves, there will be little ones enough to fill the jails.

A crime against god is a demonstrated impossibility.

The man who does not do his own thinking is a slave, and is a traitor to himself and to his fellow-men.

The only thing that makes life endurable in this world is human love, and yet, according to Christianity, that is the very thing that we are not to have in the other world. We are to be so taken up with Jesus and angels, that we shall care nothing about our brothers and sisters that have been damned. We shall be so carried away with the music of the harp that we shall not even hear the wail of father and mother. Such a religion is a disgrace to human nature.

When struck on one cheek to turn the other, is really joining a conspiracy to secure the triumph of brutality. To agree not to resist evil is to become an accomplice of all injustice.

So, ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give.

Not only are we here to protect the public from vicious criminals in the street but also to protect the public from harmful ideas.