Elizabeth Warren Quotes

If you steal from the American public, whether you use a gas pump or a gun, you ought to do hard time.

The thief or swindler who has gained great wealth by his delinquency has a better chance than the small thief of escaping the rigorous penalty of the law.

I am fed up with a system which busts the pot smoker and lets the big dope racketeer go free.

The possibility of bringing white-collar criminals to justice is ever receding over the horizon.

I want to be clear. No company is too big to be prosecuted. We have zero tolerance for corporate fraud, but we also recognize the importance of avoiding collateral consequences whenever possible.

Too many whites are getting away with drug use...Too many whites are getting away with drug sales...The answer is to go out and find the ones who are getting away with it, convict them and send them up the river, too.

As a border prosecutor, I've put criminals behind bars who worked for some of the most violent cartels in the world.

It's a monstrous idea to put people in prison and keep them there.

Individual bankers are rightly being investigated by the police. I and all colleagues in the chamber hope that if criminality is proven, they will go to jail and bear the same brunt of punishment as any other criminal.

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

One man meets an infamous punishment for that crime which confers a diadem on others.

We live in a country that talks about being the home of the brave and the land of the free, and we have the highest incarceration rate in the world.

No one wants to be sent to prison, including me.

As a former federal prosecutor with experience prosecuting both violent and white-collar criminals, I've seen what it looks like when the powerful prey on the vulnerable.

While the DOJ and the SEC must be vigilant in investigating and prosecuting white-collar misconduct, we must also ensure that we are acting fairly and prudently.

As I've seen over and over again during my career, the best way to deter individual conduct is the threat of going to jail. That's what truly changes behavior. That's what changes the calculus as employees and executives decide whether to participate in an illegal scheme.

I am tired of seeing real criminals, with lots of victims being ignored, while traditional law enforcement is busy going after perpetrators of victimless crimes such as those involved in the Silk Road Marketplace.

To those who have being stealing government money, it has to come to an end.

Any punishment that does not correct, that can merely rouse rebellion in whoever has to endure it, is a piece of gratuitous infamy which makes those who impose it more guilty in the eyes of humanity, good sense and reason, nay a hundred times more guilty than the victim on whom the punishment is inflicted.

He needs to be punished because the law hasn't punished him. He's never done any hard time.

This punishment of death is the remedy, as it were, of a sick society.

Nothing so upholds the laws as the punishment of persons whose rank is as great as their crime.

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

Thieves at home must hang; but he that puts Into his overgorged and bloated purse The wealth of Indian provinces, escapes.

The desire to punish is a desire that emanates from a place of equality and justice. The lesson I feel that we have to confront is that that impulse is so easily transmuted into something corrosive and corrupt in how it's actually put into practice. That's the danger. It's not that the impulse is wrong or unjust or not totally righteous. It's that the ways in which the system that operates, the system that we've constructed tends to not deliver the promise of equity we might want, when we look to the system to provide it.