Quotes

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

Federal prison, if you get any of it, you're going to have to do 85% of it. And the reason why I called it that is because I had a friend who got sent to the federal joint and his whole... it wasn't about him being in jail. He cried about the 85%.

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.

It is the spirit and not the form of law that keeps justice alive.

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.

Prison makes you a better judge of character. You pick up on people much faster.

He who does not prevent a crime when he can, encourages it.

There is a point at which even justice does injury.

Civilization is maintained by a very few people in a small number of places and we need only some bombs and a few prisons to blot it out altogether.

Self is the only prison that can bind the soul.

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

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

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.

No obligation to justice does force a man to be cruel, or to use the sharpest sentence.

To make punishments efficacious, two things are necessary. They must never be disproportioned to the offence, and they must be certain.

Experts and the educated elite have replaced what worked with what sounded good. Society was far more civilized before they took over our schools, prisons, welfare programs, police departments and courts. It's high time we ran these people out of our lives and went back to common sense.

Whatever you think of de Sade, he was a complex figure and we should not look for easy answers with him. He was, strangely perhaps, against the death penalty, and he was never put in prison for murders or anything like that.

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

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

The mellow sweetness of pumpkin pie off a prison spoon is something you will never forget.

The number of laws is constantly growing in all countries and, owing to this, what is called crime is very often not a crime at all, for it contains no element of violence or harm.

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

Society has used the juvenile courts to create a caste system where there are throw-away people.

While crime is punished it yet increases.