Quotes

We who live in prison, and in whose lives there is no event but sorrow, have to measure time by throbs of pain, and the record of bitter moments.

The uneven impact of actual enforcement measures tends to mirror and reinforce more general patterns of discrimination (along socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, sexual, and perhaps generational lines) within the society. As a consequence, such enforcement (ineffective as it may be in producing conformity) almost certainly reinforces feelings of alienation already prevalent within major segments of the population.

Show me the prison, Show me the jail, Show me the prisoner whose life has gone stale. And I'll show you a young man with so many reasons why And there, but for fortune, go you or I.

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.

In a civilized society, all crimes are likely to be sins, but most sins are not and ought not to be treated as crimes.

The world is a prison in which solitary confinement is preferable.

One of the many lessons that one learns in prison is, that things are what they are and will be what they will be.

A Sunday school is a prison in which children do penance for the evil conscience of their parents.

Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.

Oh who is that young sinner with the handcuffs on his wrist? And what has he been after that they groan and shake their fists? And wherefore is he wearing such a conscience-stricken air? Oh they're taking him to prison for the colour of his hair.

It is not at the table, but in prison, that you learn who your true friends are.

A variety in punishment is of utility, as well as a proportion.

I sometimes wish that people would put a little more emphasis upon the observance of the law than they do upon its enforcement.

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.

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

We're in a war. People who blast some pot on a casual basis are guilty of treason.

I have never been contained except I made the prison.

Forgiveness, that noblest of all self-denial, is a virtue which he alone who can practise in himself can willingly believe in another.

When I was in prison, I was wrapped up in all those deep books. That Tolstoy crap - people shouldn't read that stuff.

We have our own system, ... and journalists in our system are not put in prison for embarrassing the government by revealing things the government might not wish to have revealed. The important thing is that our system, under which journalists can write without fear or favor, should continue.

Every crime has, in the moment of its perpetration, Its own avenging angel--dark misgiving, An ominous sinking at the inmost heart.

You stuff somebody into the American dream, and it becomes a prison.

There are dreadful punishments enacted against thieves; but it were much better to make such good provisions, by which every man might be put in a method how to live, and so to be preserved from the fatal necessity of stealing and dying for it.

Wherever any one is against his will, that is to him a prison.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.