Quotes

It becomes not a law-maker to be a law-breaker.

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.

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices - just recognize them.

America is the land of the second chance – and when the gates of the prison open, the path ahead should lead to a better life.

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.

While crime is punished it yet increases.

Two men look out the same prison bars; one sees mud and the other stars.

The reformative effect of punishment is a belief that dies hard, chiefly I think, because it is so satisfying to our sadistic impulses.

One crime has to be concealed by another.

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.

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

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.

The penalty for laughing in a courtroom is six months in jail; if it were not for this penalty, the jury would never hear the evidence.

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

Care should be taken that the punishment does not exceed the guilt; and also that some men do not suffer for offenses for which others are not even indicted.

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.

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.

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

Clemency alone makes us equal to the gods.

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

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

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

I don't like jail, they got the wrong kind of bars in there.

What restrains us from killing is partly fear of punishment, partly moral scruple, and partly what may be described as a sense of humor.

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.