Quotes

Definition, rationality, and structure are ways of seeing, but they become prisons when they blank out other ways of seeing.

When the Nazis came for the communists, I remained silent; I was not a communist. When they locked up the social democrats, I remained silent; I was not a social democrat. When they came for the trade unionists, I did not speak out; I was not a trade unionist. When they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.

History is full of people who went to prison or were burned at the stake for proclaiming their ideas. Society has always defended itself.

No matter how you seem to fatten on a crime, that can never be good for the bee which is bad for the hive.

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.

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

The worst prison is not of stone. It is of a throbbing heart, outraged by an infamous life.

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

Assassination is the extreme form of censorship.

It was only when I lay there on the rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not between states nor between social classes nor between political parties, but right through every human heart, through all human hearts. And that is why I turn back to the years of my imprisonment and say, sometimes to the astonishment of those about me, bless you, prison, for having been a part of my life.

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

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.

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

When you are younger you get blamed for crimes you never committed and when you're older you begin to get credit for virtues you never possessed. It evens itself out.

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

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. Even if one takes every reefer madness allegation of the prohibitionists at face value, marijuana prohibition has done far more harm to far more people than marijuana ever could.

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.

If we were brought to trial for the crimes we have committed against ourselves, few would escape the gallows.

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.

The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison walls.

I can work for the Lord in or out of prison.

Shyness is the prison of the heart.

To my mind, to kill in war is not a whit better than to commit ordinary murder.

Hard cases, it is said, make bad law.

Nelson Mandela and Malcolm X came out of prison stronger.