Quotes

One should respect public opinion insofar as is necessary to avoid starvation and keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny.

What is crime amongst the multitude, is only vice among the few.

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.

By noiselessly going to a prison a civil-resister ensures a calm atmosphere.

Kill a man, and you are an assassin. Kill millions of men, and you are a conqueror. Kill everyone, and you are a God.

Some laws of state aimed at curbing crime are even more criminal.

If two people fight on the street, whose fault is it? Who is the criminal? It is the government’s responsibility because the government has not educated the people to not make mistakes. The people have inadequate, incompetent education, so they make mistakes! It is such a fraud.

Laws do not persuade just because they threaten.

Justice renders to every one his due.

When it comes to freedom, we are but prisoners of our own desires.

It is impossible to go through life without trust: That is to be imprisoned in the worst cell of all, oneself.

The idea that the sole aim of punishment is to prevent crime is obviously grounded upon the theory that crime can be prevented, which is almost as dubious as the notion that poverty can be prevented.

It is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.

We have initiated programs for re-entry offenders, since some 500,000 to 600,000 offenders will come out of prison each year for the next three or four years. We want to have positive alternatives when they come back to the community.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Justice is justice though it's always delayed and finally done only by mistake.

In prisons, those things withheld from and denied to the prisoner become precisely what he wants most of all.

He had drawn many a thousand of these rations in prisons and camps, and though he'd never had an opportunity to weight them on scales, and although, being a man of timid nature, he knew no way of standing up for his rights, he, like every other prisoner, had discovered long ago that honest weight was never to be found in the bread-cutting. There was short weight in every ration. The only point was how short. So every day you took a look to soothe your soul - today, maybe, they haven't snitched any.

Prison, dungeons, blessed places where evil is impossible because they are the crossroads of all the evil in the world. One cannot commit evil in hell.

Do not lay on the multitude the blame that is due to a few.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

Three hundred years ago a prisoner condemned to the Tower of London carved on the wall of his cell this sentiment to keep up his spirits during his long imprisonment: “It is not adversity that kills, but the impatience with which we bear adversity.”

Overlook our deeds, since you know that crime was absent from our inclination.