Quotes

Well does Heaven have care that no man secures happiness by crime.

If punishment reaches not the mind and makes not the will supple, it hardens the offender.

Prison continues, on those who are entrusted to it, a work begun elsewhere, which the whole of society pursues on each individual through innumerable mechanisms of discipline.

Reality becomes a prison to those who can’t get out of it.

A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that's unlocked and opens inwards, as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.

The guilt of enforced crimes lies on those who impose them.

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.

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.

How dreadful it is when the right judge judges wrong.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

There's no greater threat to our independence, to our cherished freedoms and personal liberties than the continual, relentless injection of these insidious poisons into our system. We must decide whether we cherish independence from drugs, without which there is no freedom.

I know not whether laws be right, or whether laws be wrong; All that we know who lie in gaol is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, a year whose days are long.

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.

The object of punishment is prevention from evil; it never can be made impulsive to good.

The virtue of justice consists in moderation, as regulated by wisdom.

While we have prisons it matters little which of us occupy the cells.

The refined punishments of the spiritual mode are usually much more indecent and dangerous than a good smack.

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

I have been studying how I may compare This prison where I live unto the world; And, for because the world is populous, And here is not a creature but myself, I cannot do it. Yet I'll hammer it out.

Only free men can negotiate. Prisoners cannot enter into contracts.

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space.

I wrote a million words in the first year, and I could never have done that outside of prison.

Intellectual despair results in neither weakness nor dreams, but in violence. It is only a matter of knowing how to give vent to one's rage; whether one only wants to wander like madmen around prisons, or whether one wants to overturn them.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.