When is conduct a crime, and when is a crime not a crime? When Somebody Up There -- a monarch, a dictator, a Pope, a legislator -- so decrees.
One of the problems that the marijuana reform movement consistently faces is that everyone wants to talk about what marijuana does, but no one ever wants to look at what marijuana prohibition does. Marijuana never kicks down your door in the middle of the night. Marijuana never locks up sick and dying people, does not suppress medical research, does not peek in bedroom windows.
Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.
Here the great art lies, to discern in what the law is to be to restraint and punishment, and in what things persuasion only is to work.
They were being driven to a prison, through no fault of their own, in all probability for life. In comparison, how much easier it would be to walk to the gallows than to this tomb of living horrors!
The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
Law is merely the expression of the will of the strongest for the time being, and therefore laws have no fixity, but shift from generation to generation.
They took away my money, my family, and my security. Why couldn't they destroy my ideas? We will question them in court tomorrow as we trigger The Revolution of all revolutions!
The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.
Corporal punishment falls far more heavily than most weighty pecuniary penalty.
I asked a man in prison once how he happened to be there and he said he had stolen a pair of shoes. I told him if he had stolen a railroad he would be a United States Senator.
Liberty is rendered even more precious by the recollection of servitude.
It isn't true that convicts live like animals: animals have more room to move around.
In my country we go to prison first and then become President.
To trial bring her stolen charms, and let her prison be my arms.
Why would anyone expect him to come out smarter? He went to prison for three years, not Princeton.
A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.
If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.
The only effect of public punishment is to show the rabble how bravely it can be borne; and that every one who hath lost a toe-nail hath suffered worse.
If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.
We are prisoners of ideas.
Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.
So justice while she winks at crimes, Stumbles on innocence sometimes.
Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.
To seek the redress of grievances by going to law, is like sheep running for shelter to a bramble bush.
